Between hope and awareness

Sunday edition of Kathimerini, 04/11/2012 by Titika Dimitroulia The place as a paradise of childhood and as an instantaneous or precarious end “Everything has either a price or a dignity. That which has a price can be replaced by its equal. That which is beyond all price and therefore has no equal, that has dignity,” says Immanuel Kant in *The Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals* (1785), and Dimitris Nollas turns this moral judgement into literature in the short stories of his new collection, with the multi-layered title ‘In the Place’: on the one hand, the place, as the – often imagined – paradise of childhood, as a homeland, whether given or chosen, as nature that is systematically violated and takes its revenge, as family, as the feeling and soul that gives birth to culture; on the other, death, instantaneous, ‘in the place’, or suspended, when some live on borrowed lives and others return from the grave for loans, money and feelings. Always the random, the unexpected, a friendly or threatening yet otherworldly presence, illuminates the joints between the worlds and the emotions that are constantly at war.The tiny crack from which vengeful goblins spring forth, who, instead of gnawing away, protect the tree of life, fears-goats and frogs, forgotten feelings that may or may not take shape, words that are deadly and healing, but also battles from foreign pages that come to life in the no-man’s-land of the refugee neighbourhoods.Nolla’s short stories, then, are about place, honour and value. The story of an abandoned baby saved by a stranger’s faith in life as an end in itself. Respect for one’s own people and their choices. Words as a remedy for loneliness. The encounter with the dead, harbinger of the living. The intervention of the supernatural to restore the dignity of the natural. The stories about smoke as a study of the fluid concept of place, movement and stillness. The story of the man who cannot bear the distant future and, of course, the story of the villainous John Silver from Stevenson’s *Treasure Island*, who here is a solitary itinerant pedlar in the ghettos, paying for sins that may be real, perhaps of his own mind, perhaps of another world long past.Place and identity, exile and alienation, everyday coincidences, familiar gestures and thoughts, conversations and silences—all are vividly alive and together assert their autonomy from the demand for their representation. Nolla’s prose is so finely crafted that it becomes transparent – and yet obscure: within it are reflected all the seeds of what might be said and what might exist. The choice of the word, its placement, obliquely evokes the distance between what is and what is said, what is and what could be, a distance created by history itself. It is precisely in this distance, which simultaneously highlights the indeterminacy of things in reality and their openness in literature, that humour finds its place, alongside a subtle tenderness that rarely raises the temperature quite a bit higher than it ought to. On the contrary, it always frames error and imperfection, when these do not lead to the dissolution of the natural and social world in which the brief human life is embedded.Reality and imagined memory, the painful limbo of the stranger who belongs neither to their birthplace nor to a foreign land, neither to a home nor to an embrace, underlying cultural shifts in an era where population movements are rewriting the history of the world, atmosphere and allusion, and a timely political moral, articulated by goblins: ‘You’ve eaten the figs,’ he said, ‘and you’ve had your fill, so eat this too.’ The fairy tale as a response to social uncertainty, or literature as knowledge of the whole, between hope and awareness.