Eftychia Giannaki: “We are dependent on the falsehood of words.”

Read below the interview given by Eftychia Giannaki to the newspaper Ta Nea and its new column ‘Recommendations’, on the occasion of the publication of *The City in the Light*, the third part of the Athens Trilogy featuring Inspector Haris Kokkinos.  The last time I was moved by a complete narrative was… a few days ago when I met Maria, who was feeding the stray cats outside the Archaeological Museum, even though she has lost her job and everything she owned and is trying to sell her helmet for ten euros, because she no longer has a motorbike, so what use is the helmet to her, but she doesn’t have a mobile either because it was stolen, and often she doesn’t even have enough to eat, though there is a cheese pie seller who helps her out at the end of the day. Though the narrative was incomplete, it was made whole by the silences, the glances and the complicit coexistence in this city that has been grinding everything down and digesting it all for centuries, inside and outside the Archaeological Museum, in such a way that even for the stories it makes no difference whether they are true or not. It is simply the navel of my own, or rather our own, world. If I could write to music, I would choose… to listen to classical music. At this time of year, I could listen for hours to Debussy’s ‘Afternoon of a Faun’ or Stravinsky’s ‘The Rite of Spring’ or Chopin’s ‘Nocturnes’, which I used to play. Not as I used to play them, but as Brigitte Engerer performs them, preferably.The most painful thing about the writing process… is that at some point you emerge from the imaginary world you’ve created—that is, from your own Garden of Eden—and find yourself back in the real world, which you realise you should never have left. The next day you repeat the same thing, not out of stupidity, but out of necessity. You are addicted to the falsehood of words. You are addicted to yourself. No higher power cares to save you from your writing, and this realisation is painful and, in a way, inevitable.Three books I would definitely recommend for a sixth-form library would be… Camus’s *The Stranger*, Kafka’s *The Trial* and Orwell’s *1984*. I read them for the first time as a teenager, and that was enough for me to realise that literature would never be a simple matter in my life. The criticism I accept concerns… every kind of opinion and perspective. When it is substantiated, it can open up a fruitful dialogue; when it is not substantiated, it may end in an interesting monologue. In any case, I seek it out. Self-criticism begins with… the word, moves on to the sentence, the paragraph, the chapter, the book, the books. I always look at the part, but also at the whole, to ensure it has some meaning so that it can exist and be read over time.The opening of a classic book that I envy is… the opening sentence of Virginia Woolf’s *Mrs Dalloway*. I won’t write it down, though, so you can’t look it up.When I hear about the ‘crisis in literature’ or ‘literature of the crisis’, I think of… those who judge without reading and those who read without judging. Find out more about Eftychia Giannaki here: www.giannaki.com