A harsh and strange homeland

Demosthenes Kourtovik | Bibliodromio, Ta Nea Savvatokyriako | 6 July 2013A road trip through 1960s Greece, in search of an enigmatic woman, becomes a kaleidoscopic parade of overt and hidden images of Greek life. The title ‘The Journey to Greece’ is a fine one. It subverts the promise of exoticism, which is implied by the connotations of the word ‘journey’ (e.g. ‘The Journey to India’), and turns it into an invitation to the adventure of discovering the familiar. Such retrospective journeys are undertaken in later life. Kazantzakis was over sixty when he finally recognised in his contemporary Greece the authentic raw materials of the myth he had been pursuing until then in other places, other eras and other worldviews. Nollas, who is not—and probably would not wish to be—Kazantzakis, has a different perspective, but ultimately he too seeks, through his ‘Journey’, a kind of re-mythologisation of the Greek homeland. Condensing time and experience, thanks to a rather expansive interpretation of the famous poetic licence, he has a twenty-three-year-old young man begin and complete this visionary journey; the young man returns to Greece after an absence of three years and leaves again after a few weeks. This brief yet eventful odyssey, filled with pivotal encounters, takes place in the autumn of 1963.Aristos, from Thessaloniki, is studying for a degree in Munich, living a bohemian lifestyle and earning some money working for a Greek merchant at the city’s vegetable market. His boss tasks him with accompanying an eccentric woman, Chrysanthi, back to Greece, and this is where the story begins. Chrysanthi had volunteered during the Occupation to work in Germany. She lived there for twenty years and is now being sent back, on the grounds that she has gone mad. Upon the train’s arrival in Thessaloniki, Chrysanthi disappears. Aristos feels compelled to find her. Meanwhile, as he makes his way through his hometown, he recalls his own past and that of his family, whilst falling out with his brother over the inheritance. The search for Chrysanthi leads him to a gay bar in Thessaloniki and then, accompanied by her younger sister, Vasiliki, to her village in the Kozani region, where they will meet the missing woman’s former fiancé (a teacher enamoured with Malakasis’s poetry) and various other characters.Aristos and Vasiliki return to Thessaloniki having achieved nothing; they become lovers for a short while, he coincidentally and fleetingly meets Chrysanthi again, settles his differences with his brother and, having entrusted a small-time publisher from Kalamaria with the publication of his poems, takes the train back to Germany. His search for the flighty Chrysanthi is thus fruitless (since her reappearance is chance and without consequence), yet Aristos’s journey is by no means fruitless, however mundane its details may seem.Through his encounters with various characters, the philandering and bohemian Aristos will realise that his homeland is an inseparable mixture of misery and redemption, human brutality and human warmth (often in the same person), an enigmatic and agonisingly multifaceted ensemble of personified contradictions: the rough, pleasure-seeking, ruthless, yet strangely human paedophile village policeman Tryfon, the eccentric provincial schoolteacher, the Romanian-speaking Vlach from Kozani who confesses that he babbles like an ancient Greek whenever he hears a rebetiko by Papaioannou, whilst earlier, on the train from Germany, a Greek-speaking Yugoslav, evidently a Slavic-speaking refugee from Greece, had identified himself as a Macedonian, and to Aristos’ indignant question, ‘What am I then?’, he had calmly replied, ‘You are a Macedonian too’. Furthermore, the Machiavellian captain of the National Army during the Civil War, the cunning yet wise-beyond-his-years loan shark of Thessaloniki, the eccentric publisher of Kalamaria.All these figures seem to carry an impenetrable mystery, which gives them a strange charm. The ark, and at the same time an attempt to transcend these contradictions, seems to be the most mysterious of all the characters in the book, none other than Chrysanthi. Her solitary, provocatively ‘stateless’, yet entirely unideological decision to go and work in the very country that was at that very moment devouring her homeland was, as she explains in her own way, an act of liberation, a practical demand to determine her own fate, far from the inertia and coercion of her surroundings. ‘Flee and save yourself,’ she urges Aristos cryptically during their final meeting. But, as Aristos has already realised that he will forever carry within him that from which he will flee again, that this is ultimately his true self, we may suspect that the same applies to Chrysanthi. What I have just written is my own interpretative suggestion regarding the book. But did Nollas intend to say something like that? And does his fictional composition hold up, in any case? This author’s writing is proverbially suggestive, so persistently suggestive, verging on mannerism, that the reader often gets the impression of evasion.In my opinion, this style works effectively in his short stories, particularly the older ones. In his (always short) novels and novellas, its weaknesses are magnified and its limitations become apparent: n disjointed narrative, n clumsy language (which, here at least, is accompanied by poor punctuation), and disconnected episodes. In ‘The Journey’, indeed, these weaknesses are amplified. There are jarring references to Pentzikis, Seferis and Hugo; uneducated villagers and uncouth gendarmes speak like intellectuals (expressing, rather, the author’s own ideas), the narrative convention itself is problematic: whilst the third-person narration has an internal focus from the outset (Aristos’s perspective), suddenly, halfway through the book, the narrative shifts a couple of times to a friend of Aristos’s from Germany, who speaks in the first person, and towards the end another narrator appears, the author himself, who makes some angry, shallow comments on Greece’s subsequent course. All this leaves a sense of sloppiness. It is paradoxical, and to Nollas’s credit, that despite all this, his novel manages to create an atmosphere, and some of its pages—especially those describing the journey through the Macedonian countryside—are truly beautiful. It seems to me that Nollas, who bears several similarities to his protagonist (born in 1963, his youth, etc.), wanted to speak of the shaping of his relationship with his homeland, to sketch his own vision of a Greece that is ‘both this and that’, the light and the dark, the historical unresolved issues and the disorder of the present, tradition and anarchic individualism. Did he choose the right way to do it? I’m not sure.