Nasia Dionysiou reads, selects, and recommends
While for me, winter is for long, complex novels—usually—that await me in the evenings on my nightstand or within arm’s reach on the couch, summers are the season for more compact books—not necessarily easier books or books to read on the beach (I never read on the beach anyway), but books that fit in my weekend bag and travel with me on short or long getaways to other cities, other countries, and other moods.
So far this summer, the book I’ve loved the most is the novel by the Bulgarian author Georgi Gospodinov, *The Gardener and Death* (trans. Alexandra Ioannidou, published by Ikaros), which begins with the striking sentence: “My father was a gardener. Now he is a garden.” The author paints a picture—striking a perfect balance between the heart-wrenching nature of personal revelation and the clarity of a masterful pen— the final months of his father’s life, while at the same time drawing on memories of his own childhood and posing questions about life from here on out. He wonders: “By the way, what happened to the Garden of Eden after it was abandoned? Did it become overgrown with weeds?”
ΣΧΕΤΙΚΑ ΑΡΘΡΑ
The novel *All the Trees* by Maria Fakinou (published by Antipodes) also falls within the realm of self-mythology. A story set in the here and now, a stark, first-person narrative, the unfiltered voice of a woman who recognizes, understands, loses, and redefines herself—as well as the boundaries of identity and language—through a love affair. “It’s the words’ fault. That’s what she thinks. Now that she wants to write, she discovers she can’t. She has to learn to write all over again from the beginning. ‘Petros,’ her hand writes, and then no more words.” It takes courage (and is rare) for anyone today to write a love story—and especially their own. Fakinou does it, and she does it well.
Set in an unspecified place and time, somewhere between cold realism and elusive allegory, Sofia Avgerinou’s exceptionally well-written novella, *Unknown Words* (Polis Publications), which leaves you at the end suspended, yet also healed, suspended between concepts, ideas, and emotions that have vanished or were never even attempted to be expressed within a world of blind or weary people. My favorite excerpt: “Stars-nothing,” I whispered, stammered, stuttered, stammered again—I don’t know. And then I added, separating what his mind had joined together: “stars-nothing.”
As if written in a dream, Kyriakos Haritos’s *Letters to the Virgin Mary* (Patakis Publishers) consists of letters sent to the Virgin Mary by her son, captured with the unparalleled tenderness and sensitivity of Haritos’s writing, which blends human and divine drama and the personal with the universal impasse. “And yet. I have no answers to give them. I know nothing more. Every time they look at me and wait, I tell them a story. As if they were children.”
The book that won’t be on a shelf in my library just yet, but will sit by my bedside for quite some time, is *And All the Evil Scatters…* (published by Agra), by the great Jenny Mastoraki, whom Dionysis Kapsalis rightly describes as the best poet of modern Greece, “because,” as he notes in his exquisite afterword, “Mastoraki was one of those whose lips God once gilded, as Elytis wrote of Solomos.” A few excerpts: “And the eyewitnesses. God’s beloved Esdras, the Virgin Mary, Paul. The Revelations. And they saw. And they saw. Pain must have a lesson.” // “That is how the giants were born. From love. The earth was drowned in blood. As it is every so often. And it will be healed. The divine heals through destruction. The Flood came, and took it all. Silence also took the lovers.” // “No lost love can be lost just once. Because no love dies. Nor does it want to.”
Among my readings was a short essay by Etel Adnan, “The Price We Are Not Willing to Pay for Love” (trans. Spyros Giannaras, Agra Publications). The essay ends with the following revealing sentence: “(…) love in all its forms is the most important thing we ever encounter, but also the most dangerous, the most unpredictable, the most unsettling. Yet it is also the only path to salvation we know.”
For the remainder of the summer, I plan to read the novel *Human Acts* (published by Kastaniotis) by the South Korean Nobel laureate Han Kang, whose understated yet poetically fleeting prose, which illuminates the fragility and pain of existence, has made me a devoted reader of hers, “Strange Stories About Ordinary People” (published by Almira) by the Cypriot author Chris Pinturicchio, whose offbeat perspective on life I greatly appreciate, as well as the short story collection *In the Greenhouses of August* (published by Kichli), by Akis Papantonis, whom I consider one of the most important writers of our generation.
Finally, for the purpose of writing a new play—which will engage in dialogue with a classic play and will be presented next spring at the Experimental Stage of the Cyprus Theater Organization— I am reading and will continue to read—“vertically, horizontally, and diagonally”—*The Crucible* (in Greek: “The Witches of Salem”) by the American playwright Arthur Miller. A play that addresses the arbitrariness of all forms of authority, dogmatic blindness, vindictive hypocrisy, and personal resistance.
