Dimitris Nollas: In the place

Blog Vivliokritika | 8 June 2012 I read Dimitris Nollas when I want to remind myself what contemporary prose is like. Despite his advanced age and his long-standing presence – four decades now – in Greek literature, Nollas’s writings are far more progressive and unconventional than those of many younger authors who reproduce stylistic motifs of pre-war ethnography, or the now well-trodden paths of foreign fiction.Texts that flow like a stream of consciousness, creating within a few pages a narrative universe so vast that it encompasses physical desire, emotional memory, indiscernible intentions, and the radical transgressions of an unpredictable everyday life.Thematically, the collection primarily concerns various forms of the ‘foreign’ or the ‘different’—whose lives, in any case, have found themselves, if only temporarily, outside a well-ordered and complacent framework. On a deeper level, however, the stories concern internal exile – which knows no national or economic borders, and which can ‘accommodate’ even the most conventional and seemingly orderly lives.The alternation of narrative perspectives, across time and shifting locations, is skilfully realised in stories such as ‘The Words of the Wind’ and ‘Inevitable Encounters’, whilst the use of internal monologue as a third party in a couple’s conversation leads to an intensification of psychological processes and a series of crucial twists in ‘A Baguette in Two’. Beautiful, and subverting various stereotypes, is the story shared with us in ‘The Burnt Papers’, as is the one in ‘Baby in the Hammock’ — but the story in the collection that I feel will stay with me for a long time is ‘The Price of Dreams’.This marks Nolla’s debut with Ikaros Publications. I hope we will soon see further fruits of this collaboration. Source