Diamonds in the rough

Vangelis Hatzivassiliou, To Vima, 26 August 2012 Dimitris Nollas depicts, without a trace of melodrama, everyday heroes striving to avoid a violent severance from their surroundings. These paradoxical human figures, who struggle to adapt to their surroundings and find it difficult to define their relationship both with others and with themselves, make their presence felt from the very first moment in prose of Dimitris Nollas. Bound by aimless wandering and chance, as well as resigned to the ambiguity or even the futility of their existence, Nollas’s heroes withdraw from the public sphere very early on. And while self-abandonment and indeterminacy constitute one aspect of their confused individuality, the other reveals the web of fear, betrayal and guilt formed by their contact with political activism and terrorism.But when Nollas moves away from terrorism into the world of xenophobia and alienation, the dislocation or fragmentation of the characters leads to a new form of enslavement capable of reaching total destruction and death. And such a drama can, of course, only evoke the decline of another form of community: bonds of solidarity are rapidly disappearing from most societies that host migrants.Whichever version of Nolla’s prose we examine, the reality remains the same: the author highlights and illustrates an individualism that observes and experiences the world with all its vital forces exhausted.The Balance of Terror I am reading Nolla’s new collection of short stories, entitled In the Place, and I am left with the impression that something has changed, albeit imperceptibly, in his style. The protagonists are once again walking a tightrope, searching in vain for meaning in their spineless lives, yet they do not end up at the precipice. A poor musician who has fallen on hard times in Greece and a Greek homeless man decide, willy-nilly, to take a child under their wing in order to save him from his mother’s icy indifference (‘Baby on the Swing’). A solitary passenger discovers, during a train stop, the comforting power of companionship (‘The Words of the Wind’).A bitter man who has stolen his sister’s jewellery to avenge her refusal to sell their father’s estate comes to his senses thanks to the woman by his side (‘A Bagel for Two’). Two lovers, stoned by everyone, manage to find refuge in a space of unique intimacy (“Still Life of the Waters”). A drifter swept up in the deceptive pursuit of wealth manages to love an angelic little girl from the depths of his heart (“The Price of Dreams”). An old woman, immersed in her loneliness, constantly burns the cards she plays with her plumber so she can continue to listen to his stories (“The Burnt Cards”). No overflowing emotion, not a single melodramatic note. Nollas seeks to find diamonds amidst hot coals. His heroes will never take the great leap and will under no circumstances break out of the confined circle of their lives. They will, however, manage to avoid a violent severance from their surroundings, reaching out to one another, even if only spasmodically.Through this peculiar manoeuvre, they will be able, perhaps for the first time in a book by Nolla, to chart their course and give shape to their fluidity. As for the counterweights, they will always be there: loan sharks eager to trample on their old friendship (‘Inevitable Encounters’), cynics and money-grubbers who will amass fortunes (‘A Paradise of Gold’), Easterners who will not forget their archaic fate in Europe (‘Matzikert’) and the despondent who will not rejoice in their good fortune (‘In the Land’). A balance of terror? Perhaps. On the other hand, however, there is tormented humanity and a great deal of unpretentious grit in a book that immediately stands out for its simplicity and candour.Ghosts, goblins and lizards that paint. Dimitris Nollas’s characters appear on the scene in media res: starting halfway through and with the certainty that it is impossible for them to end up anywhere. Without exactly undermining the logical sequence of the narrative, yet without rejecting the contribution of the irrational, the obscure or the dream, Nollas transcends the self-evident tenets of realism in two fundamental ways: by disrupting the psyche of his characters and by abruptly fracturing the unity of his narrative time.In his new short stories, he frequently resorts to the element of the fantastical, which intrudes without warning into the action, to lend it a momentarily ambiguous dimension and place it in a state of suspension between the real and the transcendent: into something that Tsvetan Todorov has termed the marvellous. Nolla’s marvellous allows the heroes to strike up conversations with their beloved ghosts, unleashes strange shadows mingled with mists of unknown origin, mobilises goblins who descend fully armed down steep slopes, or makes lizards draw incomprehensible pictures on the ceiling.As for the characters’ disorientation, they are all slightly out of step with the universe, without, however, turning into madmen: travellers surrounded by atmospheric elements they are unable to decipher, men who have been cast out involuntarily (or perhaps of their own volition?) by their families, women who honour their bodies despite their widowhood (against the objections of relatives and friends), shepherds who struggle with strange entities, Franco-Levantine people who do not set aside their barbaric origins, dreamers who fall from the heavens into earthly chaos, outcasts who save a piece of bread for their neighbour (even as they kill one another time and again) or people who have escaped the clutches of Death only to welcome him into their homes through the back door.