The Generation of the 1930s in the Resistance

Stavroula Papaspyrou | Eleftherotypia | 18 May 2013 Dorina Papaliou felt the need to express herself through writing from childhood, but “I suppressed it”, as she admits. “Because both my parents were involved in the film industry, I was daunted by the uncertainty of creativity and would throw away whatever I wrote, without anyone ever reading it.”But then, at the age of 30, she put her academic credentials aside – she had studied neurobiology, history and anthropology in the US and the UK – and by the age of 40 had written five children’s stories, a comic-style crime novel, *Gatter*, and *The Essential Light*, now published by *Ikaros*. From @zuzu28’s Instagram: Voluminous – over 600 pages – and with a masterfully structured plot, her new book conceals an entire library within it, as a significant part of it is set during the Occupation, whilst its tentacles stretch from the artistic concerns of a group of pioneering 19th-century Scottish painters to those of the representatives of the Generation of the 1930s, and from the activities of Greek and British resistance organisations to the search for works of art stolen during the Second World War. ‘Indeed,’ he says, ‘I read a great deal, not only before I began, but also whilst I was working on it, so that I could understand what was happening in periods I hadn’t lived through, immerse myself in the prevailing atmosphere, and be able to situate my heroes ideologically.’The Lost PaintingAlthough based on so much historical information, ‘The Essential Light’ never feels like an encyclopaedic read. In the simplest terms imaginable, Papaliou narrates two parallel love stories – one contemporary, the other set in the 1940s – and, maintaining the suspense right to the end, sheds light on the mystery shrouding the traces of a lost painting. Her ambition was to explore, in essence, the gap between what happens and what is subsequently conveyed in writing or orally, the relationship between loss and memory, and the fragile bonds that link the past with the present. And after three and a half years of work, drawing on the discipline she had acquired as a champion horse rider in her teenage years, she succeeded with flying colours. Dorina Papaliou ‘Essential Light’ opens with the arrival in Athens from Oxford of the anthropologist Louisa Laskaratou, who is confronted with the last ‘message’ her father managed to leave her before his sudden death: A photograph featuring the only self-portrait by the renowned Scottish painter, who was her great-grandfather. A photograph in which, beyond the painting, the heroine’s grandmother, Louise Hatzilouka—also a painter—is captured at a young age; a student – a fictional licence – of Parthenis before the war and utterly enchanted by the Attic light, who was executed by the Germans on the eve of the December events, on charges of espionage.The child of divorced parents, with an aversion to her mother and an unacknowledged weakness for her father, whom she had never had enough of, Louisa Laskaratou carries the story of this particular painting with her like a talisman. She heard it as a child from her father’s lips instead of a bedtime story, thus learning the eventful history of her ancestors with their Scottish and Asia Minor roots. As she will soon discover, the story of the painting, which disappeared in 1944, is inextricably linked to her grandmother’s execution. And with the help of a young lawyer whom she loved to hate, because she believed he was reaping the love of her father that was rightfully hers, she will be thrown into an adventure that will shake all the certainties she held dear. The ‘heroic’ fairy tale of her childhood will prove to have many dark sides. The revelation of the truth, however, will set her free. Love and War Dorina Papaliou belongs to a ‘generation without a history’ when it comes to the Occupation and the Civil War. Today, however, she is certain: ‘If you had a soul, there was no way you could remain neutral during those years. The side one chooses, however, I believe depends mainly on one’s experiences.’ Louise Hatzilouka, of middle-class origins, the heroine with whom she most identifies, from the very outbreak of the Greco-Italian War, sets aside her painting and channels all her energy into caring for wounded soldiers at the hospital set up on the grounds of the Arsakeio.It is there that she meets a man of Alexandrian origin who maintains contacts with the British SOE organisation, and, risking her life, she helps him in his resistance activities. The romantic attraction they feel for one another takes a back seat to the demands of the struggle, but the blue gaze of Hatzilouka in the famous photograph where she poses in front of her grandfather’s self-portrait is directed at this man. And it is—alas—this gaze, proof of her love, that will lead her to her execution all the sooner… We need not reveal any more. The search for the lost painting in ‘Essential Light’ is the ideal vehicle for travelling to Glasgow, Smyrna, Athens under occupation, and also to Arles, home to Van Gogh’s ‘yellow house’, to explore the quest for authenticity in art, as well as the quest for love expressed by almost all the book’s characters, and to hope that we never again experience such violent times as those brought to life by Papaliou through her sparse, cinematic prose. I wonder how closely Apostolos Doxiadis, to whom she has been married for 23 years, followed the creation of her novel? ‘In our home,’ she replies, ‘it is a rule that no one speaks of their writing until it is finished. Whenever I was in despair, however, he always made sure to reassure me. That is what I owe him: absolute trust!’