Love, memory and art

Vangelis Hatzivassiliou | To Vima tis Kyriakis | 30 June 2013 A look back at the past becomes a thriller that judges the presentA girl scarred by a lack of affection and tenderness from her separated parents, n Louisa Lascaratos is preparing an exhibition in Oxford featuring artefacts and masks from Nigeria. Her father’s death will bring her to Athens, where she will find herself faced with a strange inheritance: a photograph of the self-portrait of her Scottish great-grandfather Jonathan Dodson, one of the pioneering painters of the 19th century, whose works have long been in high demand.But what has become of the self-portrait in the photograph? What paths has it taken, and in whose hands might it have ended up? Louisa, who was hostile to everyone at the outset (who, along with her parents, also hates her father’s assistant at his law firm) will gradually become entangled in the mystery of the lost painting, and her investigation will take her back to the early 1940s: a time when the struggle of the Greeks and British against Nazism was at its height. While searching for the story of her one and only beloved, her Greek-Scottish grandmother Louise Hatzilouka, Louisa discovers her love for a Greek resistance fighter, whilst she herself begins to fall in love with her father’s assistant, who proves to be a tireless ally in her research. In her first novel, entitled The Essential Light, Dorina Papaliou skilfully weaves together a powerful thematic triptych: the triptych of memory, art and love. Just as the objects and masks that Louisa is to present in Oxford reconstruct the memory of a forgotten Nigerian tribe, so too will Dodson’s lost painting reconstruct the memory of the painter Louise Hadjilouka, forgotten in the 21st century. In the midst of the Second World War, Dodson’s granddaughter will draw from the powerful inner light of his self-portrait the very essence of her own art: an art identified with the exaltation evoked in the mind and senses by the colours of the Athenian landscape (the artistic atmosphere here clearly alludes to the artistic and ideological quests of the 1930s generation). The unstoppable force of love will drive a wedge into this delicate interconnection of memory and art. Despite its tightly woven structure, Papaliou’s book is not without its problems. The most serious of these is its excessive length, which, without resorting to padding or repetition, stumbles into protracted descriptions that hinder its dramatic intensity. Another serious problem is the historical setting, which is trapped in a sort of encyclopaedic listing of events, as well as in a logic of retrospective political correctness that limits their anthropological depth. The characters, however, often seem one-dimensional and clumsy, with conflicts that do not avoid imposing a formulaic, if not stereotypical, line on most of their reactions and clashes.A substantial counterbalance in this regard, however, will be the two main characters: n Louise Hatzilouka and n Louisa, who will win us over from the very first moment with their rich contradictions and explosive temperament. The main virtue of Papaliou’s novel, however, is, as I mentioned earlier, n the coherence with which its central thematic motifs are woven together, as well as n the meticulous organisation of the plot, which carefully guards its secret right up to the very last lines, skilfully revealing every stage through which we reach the final resolution.