A journey into the ‘heart of darkness’

Aristotelis Sainis | The Journalists’ Newspaper | 16 March 2013 In his most voluminous novel to date, the minimalist novelist attempts, once again, to shed light on the dark side of the country. Some wish to live seven lives, some have died and simply haven’t realised it, some cling stubbornly to the shell of life. The 1960s, the human geography of northern Greece and the coordinates of northern Europe, mythological allusions and literary fragments, as well as fateful destinies on the cusp of dream and reality, intersect to map the here and beyond of memory—both individual and collective.Dimitris Nollas’s new novel ‘The Journey to Greece’, recently published by Ikaros Publications, is read and presented by Aristotelis Sainis.M. Fais Just as the grotesque scenes in the offices of ‘The Lighthouse of the Blind’ formed the core of Alexandros Kotzias’s ‘Antiposeis Archis’ (1996), a den of debauchery appears to be the starting point of Dimitris Nollas’ latest novel. Pages from the relevant chapter were already published in autumn 2011 in the magazine ‘Odos Panos’. Skampardonis’ billiard halls (‘Too Much Butter on the Dog’s Hide’, 2006) and Vasilikos’s dens in ‘Z’ pale in comparison to this hidden, Europeanised backwater of ‘Bombay’, concealed behind smoked meats and bunches of garlic. Here, in the centre of Thessaloniki, the motley crew of patrons ends up in a surreal orgy: drunkards and street urchins, teenagers and young labourers, shop assistants and street vendors, but also contractors, estate agents, merchants and loan sharks, and finally, the police, today, protesting against their commanders being referred to the investigating magistrate… This is where ‘the heart of the city’ beats! The early years of the turbulent 1960s, and the ‘murder’ of Lambrakis casts its grim shadow over the foggy co-capital. ‘Mother’ Thessaloniki, once a labyrinthine refugee shantytown, is transformed into ‘a well down to the centre of the earth’ by ‘modernising’ reconstruction. The Tagmatasfalites, the Paotzides, the Poulikis, and the plunderers of Jewish property still hold sway. The narrative is framed by the assassination of Lambrakis (May 1963) and the elections of the same year, which bring to power a ‘bunch of Centrists, thirsty for money and power’, whilst the story’s timeline stretches back to the years of the Civil War, often even further, following the personal stories that converge in the present of the narrative.However, the precise chronotopic coordinates do not negate the text’s mythical aura, but merge with it. Undead Argonauts, demonised Prometheuses, Ariadnes and Penelopes, Icaruses and Odysseuses move openly or covertly through the text. Damned Hesiodic ‘poliokrotaphos infants’ repeat the same banal everyday story. Folk songs, biblical passages, overt or veiled intertextual references (Malakasis, Pentzikis, Seferis, Nietzsche – Kazantzakis, Goethe, Melville, etc.) create a textual labyrinth, analogous to the one in which the fictional characters move.Aristos Karabinis, a student in Germany who dreams of becoming a painter or even a poet, returns to his homeland, his mind still filled with ‘heroic holocausts, bloody acts of sabotage and massacres’. He is accompanied by an enigma, Chrysanthi: an early emigrant to Germany from the time of the Occupation, with an almost unknown background, only to lose her as soon as he arrives in Thessaloniki…The supplementary chapters at the beginning (‘Heading South’) and the ‘Northern European ascent’ at the end frame ‘Journey to Greece’. Aristos’s initial intention for an ‘exploratory visit’ to his birthplace quickly turns into an attempt to grasp the image of the ever-present and ever-absent, the innocent-guilty Chrysanthi (Margarita, Eleni and Evridiki together). Her death shifts the focus of the quest and places him at its centre. The leisure trip becomes an ‘apprenticeship’. In the northern Greek hinterland, steeped in myths and blood, at the bedside of the ailing, Promethean Apostolos, Aristos will come face to face with ‘horror’. In his attempt to unravel the tangle of old stories and shed light on dark family affairs, he will lose himself in the labyrinths of personal and collective memory, in the many ‘truths’ of personal narratives and historical accounts. An Odyssean ‘Nekyia’? A Virgilian ‘descent’? Dante’s Inferno? A new version of Faust? As the ‘gates’ of his hometown slowly close behind him, Aristos will be forced to pay his own ‘ransom’. Tryfon, a ‘peculiar child-monger’, a gendarmerie officer, in the role of Mephistopheles, will offer to ‘help’. Shortly before his departure from Greece towards the light (?), Aristos’s final, hesitant glance at Chrysanthi – before losing her for the second and final time – accompanies his decision to publish his poems. Perhaps because ‘writing begins with the gaze of Orpheus’ (Blanchot).‘Journey to Greece’, one of the longest works by the meticulous minimalist Nolla, constitutes the fictional development of his latest collection of short stories (‘In the Place’, Ikaros, 2012), as well as the dominant theme of his prose: the search for identity within an inhospitable and hostile world. As for the novel’s narrator, he surveys the story from above, shifts narrative levels, gradually becoming interventionist or even didactic, glancing askance and at times looking the dystopian present straight in the eye, convinced that ‘closely bound together, human beings drag behind them all that is to follow, always amidst all that was and is in the making’.