In Greece via "Bombay"

Vagelis Hatzivassiliou | To Vima tis Kyriakis | Sunday 28 April 2013 The journey of a Greek man from Munich to Thessaloniki in the 1960s and the ghosts of the Civil War. Dimitris Nollas’s most extensive novel. When, in May 1963, Grigoris Lambrakis is killed under the wheels of the murderous tricycle driven by Emmanouilidis and Gotzamanis, Greece would already be fifteen years removed from the end of the Civil War. With the difference that, at this stage, the Civil War would be tending to become a spectre of everyday life, a pathology detectable at the most diverse levels of society. It is to such a society that Aristos Karabinis will return shortly after the assassination of Lambrakis; although he works in the Munich vegetable market, having long since abandoned his studies, he refuses to give up his artistic ambitions — to become a poet or a painter. Aristos will bring a woman from Munich to Thessaloniki who began working in German industry during the Nazi era and now suffers from paranoia. The woman will disappear as soon as they arrive in Greece, and the search for her will lead Aristos into the depths of the civil war past: a past that has completely taken over the present and staunchly opposes any different future.  With Journey to Greece, Dimitris Nollas seems to be bringing an end to the respite hinted at in his short story collection from last year, entitled In the Place. Whereas there was a hint of the possibility of a community of basic solidarity in that collection, with his latest novel we return to the fragmented and deeply eroded sense of community found in his previous books. Aristos will encounter a veritable hell in his hometown: his family will attempt to get their hands on his estate in close collaboration with loan shark rings, n the police will threaten to revoke his passport unless he provides information about his left-wing friends in Munich, and n the woman he is searching for will mock all the ambitions he had the folly to harbour for his birthplace. And yet, when Karabinis reaches the heart of the Civil War through following Apostolos’s adventures, reality will not change. People will be slaughtered for an empty shirt, and the only thing that will prevail in the hearts of those who survive will be annihilation: political, social, moral and existential.In writing his most extensive and, consequently, his most accomplished novel, Nollas begins and concludes his story in motion: on the train travelling first from Munich to Thessaloniki and then from Thessaloniki to Munich. The rest of the plot will be confined to the parenthesis of the intervening period: Aristos’s journey to Greece will be nothing more than a temporary interlude, a situation that will intervene between two train journeys, ending with his return to Germany when all hope and resilience for Greece has been lost. With a tapestry of poetic allusions (from biblical and classical passages, folk songs by Seferis and Pentzikis, as well as Vasilis Vasilikos and Giorgos Skambardonis), Nollas sets up an emblematic scene that will shatter the novel’s historical timeline to reveal, through a morbidly seductive atmosphere, the timeless survival of opportunism, compromise and corruption. This is the descent into the sinful ‘Bombay’, a gloomy centre of entertainment, where everything that remains hidden for life in the upper world – the world of costumed dignity – will be revealed. ‘Bombay’ will define the boundaries of the Greek landscape and will be the sole guarantee of its continuity. An exceedingly bitter conclusion, but the purpose of literature is not to help us swallow the camel. All the more so when we are dealing with a writer of Nolla’s calibre.