Surname: STAMATISFirst Name: ALEXANDER
Categories : Poetry/ Novel / Short Story
Date of Birth: 1960
Place of Birth: Athens
Education: 1978-1979 - DEPARTMENT OF MATHEMATICS OF THE GREEK NATIONAL UNIVERSITY (NTU). Studied for one year.
1979-1985 - NATIONAL TECHNICAL UNIVERSITY OF ATHENS, DEPARTMENT OF ARCHITECTURE, DIPLOMA IN ARCHITECTURE
His diploma project on the "Transformation of a Soccer Stadium into a Multi-Function Centre" was awarded the top distinction of the University. It was later published in the most influential Greek Architectural magazine "Architecture in Greece" (vol.20/1986).
1985-1986 - ARCHITECTURAL ASSOCIATION SCHOOL OF ARCHITECTURE, GRADUATE SCOOL, LONDON. GRADUATE DIPLOMA IN HOUSING STUDIES
Also took courses in Energy Architecture
1987-1988 - POLYTECHNIC OF CENTRAL LONDON, POST GRADUATE DIPLOMA IN FILM AND TV STUDIES
Diploma thesis: " To what extent do the insights of psychoanalysis inform a study of the Cinema "
1986-1988 - ARCHITECTURAL ASSOCIATION SCHOOL OF ARCHITECTURE, NATIONAL COUNCIL OF
ACADEMIC AWARDS (NCAA) MASTER OF PHILOSOPHY ( MPhil ) in SOCIAL STUDIES
Career: Athens ARCHITECTURE 1992-1995 . Designed a multi-storey office building in the centre of Athens (Patission 120 & Androu). . Worked as a partner of the architectural firm "N.K.M.M.S" Ltd in various projects in Greece . 1989-1991 . Worked as an architect for the architectural firm " C.Stamatis, D.Nakos, K.Karanopoulos, P.Moundrouvalis and Associates Ltd" in various projects in Greece and in the United Arab Emirates. 1980-1985 . During student years in the Architectural Department of the National Technical University of Athens worked as an assistant architect in tha above mentioned firm in various projects in Greece and abroad. Athens ADVERTISING 1996 -97 Worked as a writer in “EY” magazine and in “Athinorama” weekly guide. Athens JOURNALISM 1996-2000 Worked as a artickle`s writer in “KATHIMERINI” and “VIMA” newspapers, in “ART”, “KLIK”, “MEN”, “METRO”, “EY”, “VOQUE” “SYMBOL” “DIFONO” magazines in matters of literature, art in general and architecture. Worked as a critic in “DIAVAZO” and “BEST SELLER” literary magazines
Awards: 1994 - 1st award of the City of Athens in memory of the Greek poet Nikiforos Vrettakos for his second book of poetry : "Architecture of the Intémate Spaces"
Extra Activities: ORGANISATION OF POETRY READINGS - Has organises and takes part in a series of poetic readings and literary presentations which take place in the "Theatre of Cephallinias Street", sponsored by the "Praxis Theatre Group" of which he is an active member. - Read poetry in the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in August 1998 Contribution to school cinema club, basket-ball, netball, soccer member of the school's chess team, wimmer in Panathinaicos Swimming club, took part in national swimming games.
Foreign Languages: English, French
E-mail Address: bm-sruome@otenet.gr
Works:
COLLECTIONS OF POEMS
1992 . “ The Corner Of the World ” SOCOLIS EDITIONS
1993 . “ Architecture of the Intimate Spaces ” KASTANIOTIS EDITIONS
1995 . “ A Simple Method of Three ” KASTANIOTIS EDITIONS
1999 . “ Dense Now ”. ELLINIKA GRAMMATA
NOVELS
1998 . “ The Seventh Elephant ” KEDROS
2000 . “ The Seventh Elephant ” ARCADIA BOOKS (London)
2000 . “ Bar Flober ” KEDROS
MAGAZINES
1998 “Poetry in Translation” KINGS COLLEGE
His work was selected among established Greek poets of the 20 the century
1992-1997 . Original poems, literary translations
Articles and reviews on the poems have been published in the following leading Greek magazines:
REYMATA (WAVES)/ MANDRAGORAS/ DIAVAZO (I READ)/ PORFYRAS/ GRAMMATA & TEHNES (LITERATURE & ART)/ I LEXI (THE WORD)/ ODOS PANOS (PANAS STREET)/ SELIDES (PAGES)/ ROPTRO/ ELI - TROHOS/ NEO EPIPEDO
TRANSLATIONS
1993-1995 - Translated for various Greek magazines important works of the writers of the Beat Generation (Kerouak, Ginsberg,Corso), as well as British poets (Blake, Shelley) .
BAR FLAUBERT
translated by David Connolly
READ AN EXCERPT: BAR FLAUBERT
My father
“You mentioned on the phone about some phrase...”
My father took a deep puff on his pipe.
Difficult to fight with your soul. It’s an unequal contest. Like all wars..."
“Like all...?” I asked.
“Wars.”
"Wars?"
“Yes, civil ones. Like all civil wars.”
“When did you write that?”
“I didn’t write it. I felt it.”
“You felt it?”
“Yes. As soon as I woke up. It wasn’t a dream though. It was that tender hour just before waking. When everything is in a state of semi-inertness...”
“It must have been the after-effects of some dream. That intermediate stage between sleeping and waking.”
“No doubt that plays some role. The closer a thought is at the time you wake up, the greater the effect of the dream’s warmth on it. The person’s at an intermediate stage, his mind is wandering in a fantasy.”
I smiled:
“Just imagine if you heard another father and son talking about such things. It still seems strange to me that I’ve a father who’s a writer...”
“It struck you as strange even when you were small... I remember you secretly watching me through the door of my study...”
“Yes. I used to think that you lived somewhere else, in a strange land. Do you remember how I liked to listen to stories when I was a boy? At first, I thought that they came from beyond the world, from where music comes and numbers... When I first realized that my dad’s work was to make up stories in our own home, where we ate and slept, I got a fright! Don’t laugh! It was dangerous for a boy to live in a house with a father who made up stories and heroes.”
“Heroes? There are no heroes, only people. People, characters that visit me. It’s a kind of co-existence,” said father, who appeared to be enjoying the conversation. “When I’m writing, I can feel them moving inside me, experiencing what I experience during the course of the day.”
“And when you finish the text, they go away. They go to sleep...”
“When the text is finished, it’s they who belong to the readers. I’m the one who goes to sleep!” said father, laughing. “No, that’s a lie, there’s no sleep for me...” he went on, “after I’ve put the final full-stop, I go through a period of inner reflection, almost meditation, on the text. I didn’t ask him what he meant. It wasn’t necessary. “I sit and observe it,” he added, “like looking at a painting. I note the balance, the volume, the correspondences. I want the finished text to breathe with sharp gasps, to crack open without revealing its openings. And it’s there, in the cracks, that I try to entice the reader, to camouflage the hole so that the unsuspecting reader will fall in. But take note! I’m referring to a reversal that of necessity has to be justified by two things: by the particular weight of the characters and by the conflicts between them. Everything, but everything, has to be justified in a novel, Yannis! It has to be a perfect, flawless construction, like a building, have the supporting structure, the elements it supports, openings, even an expansion-joint! The reader may see it all as being smooth and plastered, but inside there’s a whole cosmogony: mortar, stones, bricks, cement, beams... The text’s intestines have to work to perfection. Otherwise, dear boy, it collapses. It collapses and dissolves into its constituent parts.”
“Reversal... Though in your last book, not every page goes hand in hand with the previous one. Everything is linear. Everywhere detailed images, historical references completely documented, you’ve left nothing to chance. I remember somewhere how you even describe the cut of the lawyer’s clothes... The narrative is chronologically constructed. Twenty-four hours in each chapter. The entire novel covers a week. The book’s like one long procession...”
“I’m glad you see it that way. Except that, to get to the end of that procession, you have to read through some five hundred pages,” my father said with a wily grin.
“Come on, I didn’t mean it negatively. You know how much I like it...” I said, apologetically.
There was a sudden silence. That often happened in conversations with my father. It was an unequal silence. For him, it was ‘functional’, part of the flow of the conversation. For me it was embarrassment, since, while it lasted, my father never stopped looking at me, and intently too, as if he was trying to gauge the impact that his words had had on me. Even as a young boy, I remember him with his beady eyes, behind his glasses, fixed on me as if I’d done something bad. Now, of course, it was no longer Markos Loukas in his prime that I had before me. I had a seventy-year-old man full of opinion and whims.
Outwardly, he was in pretty good shape. Tall, round-faced, stocky build, with a good crop of white hair for his age, a delicate well-formed mouth; he vaguely recalled his implacable friend, Pentzikis. His health in recent years hadn’t been the best, a balloon to unblock his arteries, a prostate operation, yet these hadn’t seemed to get him down.
My father continued to stare at me with an Apollonian calm. Markos Loukas was not the sort a boy would want for a teacher. A cool breeze that came unexpectedly through the half-open balcony door made him shudder. I got up and shut it and, returning to my armchair, I lit a cigarette and broke the deadlock:
“When’s mum coming?”
“I’m expecting her any time now.”
“I haven’t seen her for a long while. It must be at least a month. How time goes...”
“A month. What’s a month? You young people have a strange relationship with time. At my age, time flows by somewhat differently. Mine is coming to a standstill. When the biological hand reaches fate’s slot, then time will point to my allotted hour.”
“Dad, I don’t want you thinking like that...”
“Look, Yannis, I’ve always been a realist. Even in my collection of short stories, back in ’65, when all the critics had a go at me -what’s up with Loukas, the characters aren’t convincing, the structure’s unsound-, even then I knew that my writing was realistic. I knew that everything that happened in the book was what the characters had either felt or were in a position to have felt. I told you, everything has to be justified. In any case, I never set much store by what the critics said...”
“That didn’t stop you writing critical reviews yourself. All those years you wrote for Narration...”
“Don’t forget that, first of all, I wrote under a pseudonym and, secondly, I chose books that I liked. I’ve also written libels, of course. Like in the case of that fraud, Matthaiou, in the period following the dictatorship...” said father. Immediately, I sensed him wincing, as if he’d uttered something that was forbidden.
“What fraud? Who’s Matthaiou?” I asked, astonished.
“Water under the bridge...”
“Come on, tell me. Besides it has to do with our work,” I argued.
“Nothing to tell, he was a strange fellow who’d sent me a text...”
“What text? Was it ever published?”
“No, thanks to me... He’d sent me a novel, God forbid... I went to a lot of trouble to make sure “Hestia” didn’t publish it. He had people behind him in America. People with influence. Ginsberg, Burroughs and such like. Didn’t you find anything in the archives?”
“Not yet.”
“Yes, that’s one thing I most likely threw away. Anyhow. It was at around that time that we almost ruined our literature.”
My father had begun to raise his tone:
“Greece wasn’t America! We didn’t have a Dos Passos in prose; we didn’t have a Cummings in poetry. We had Karagatsis and Seferis. That’s why I fell out with Pentzikis. I’d no objections at all to free association, even Faulkner used it. But that total disintegration, no respect for anything... where’s the structure, the characters, the sequence of events? Prose is not just jumping from one thing to another. Prose is foot-slogging... you need a steady step and open eyes...”
I understood that my father didn’t want to go on discussing this particular subject.
“I suppose you’re talking about the trend in new novels after the Dictatorship.”
“New novel? That wasn’t a novel. Not even a story.”
“But there were some writers...” I began.
“Writers?” said my father, abruptly. “Only in name. I’m a writer too. But something more.”
“Something more?”
“Writer is a noun and nouns get tired of standing alone. They look for an adjective to lend them support. I’m more than a writer.”
“Won’t you ever stop talking in codes, father?”
“I like codes, Yannis, I wouldn’t have got where I have without them.”
“That cynicism,” I started to comment.
“Cynicism, Yannis, is adrenaline to an old man.”
“You’ve certainly got a way with words, dad...”
“I’ve a way with them because I used to listen to them.”
I knew what was going to follow.
“From being fifteen years’ old, I accompanied your grandfather round the salons,” my father went on unstoppably. “Always just behind him. And they were all there: Myrivilis, Karagatsis, Seferis, Terzakis, Prevelakis...”
“You don’t have to tell me the story again. I’ve heard it countless times...” I said, almost pleading.
“You need to hear it and to hear it again and again. I didn’t spend all my days and nights with journals and glossy magazines... For the whole time that I was a student, for five years, I’d go twice a week to the houses of writers -your grandfather hung out with all the most interesting people- and I’d listen. I didn’t speak, I listened. I made coffee, helped the women serve, emptied the ashtrays... Only if they spoke to me did I mumble something back to them. And like that, my mind eventually opened up. Through listening. That’s how it is, literature calls for hard work. We don’t just churn out a couple of incomprehensible phrases like Matthaiou and think we’re through. That’s where the adjective comes in that I was telling you about -and don’t think I’m arrogant. But I’m more than just a writer. I’m a true writer.”
At that moment, we heard the sharp sound of the front door opening and, a couple of seconds later, my mother appeared in the living room with two large plastic bags full of shopping. A faint smell of perfume spread through the air, lightening the atmosphere. She stood at the entrance to the living room and stared at us, smiling. My mother is a tall woman, almost the same height as my father, very thin, her hair dyed a brown tint and, in recent years, quite short. Her face is slender, aristocratic, accentuated nose, green eyes, bright, a slanting scar on her forehead, the result of a car accident when she was a child. Her movements were delicate, like those of a dancer. Her gait had something musical about it, something imperceptibly affected, as if her every movement were obeying some personal choreography.
I got up and kissed her. She gently touched her lips against my cheek. My mother, like my father, was not particularly demonstrative. Effusiveness was not something held in honour in the Loukas kingdom. Our relationship was characterized by an emotional reservation, each member kept a safe distance from the other. It was by no means a coincidence that I’d never seen my parents kissing on the lips, nor ever holding each other’s hand.
My mother is best described by the adjective “indefinable”. Her motherliness is faint, like a wet window-pane, I never knew where I was with her, at times I felt her clinging to me like an oyster, without leaving me any space to breathe, at others like a limpet prised free and sinking to the bottom of the sea. I loved my mother, I loved that transient emotion she conveyed to me, I loved her in the way she fluttered around me like a butterfly. Her tenderness was so special; hers was a behaviour that for many years I couldn’t deal with, until I accepted it as it was, I accepted that goodwill, that discreet tool that in our relationship drew that fine line separating parent and child.
The three of us in the living-room. Was it real? All three? When I was small, I imagined my family like a large room; in which lived my parents, all my relatives and their branches, my cousins, uncles, together with my friends, my parents’ friends, and my teachers. As I grew up, the people gradually began to leave. At first, it was the distant relatives, then my parents’ friends, the uncles and the cousins. As time passed, among the last to leave were the teachers, followed by the friends and grandparents, till in the end there were only three of us left: my mother, my father and me. This arrangement lasted for quite a while longer, till about eight or nine years ago, when I was around thirty and when, to my great surprise, the next person to leave the room was not me, the emancipated thirty-year-old, or my father, the counterweight. It was her, my mother, who discreetly flew off into the unknown through a gap in the window, leaving us, the two men, sitting in two armchairs facing each other and silently staring into each other’s eyes.
My mother didn’t stay long. She was tired, all day at the art gallery and then shopping, and she wanted to go and have a lie down. I proposed that we all eat together, but she didn’t want to. She didn’t eat much, two mouthfuls and that was it. I sat with my father a bit longer, we discussed one or two things about the book and then, since it was already late, we postponed the Pentzikis correspondence for the next day. I said goodnight and went down to the basement.
Career: Athens ARCHITECTURE 1992-1995 . Designed a multi-storey office building in the centre of Athens (Patission 120 & Androu). . Worked as a partner of the architectural firm "N.K.M.M.S" Ltd in various projects in Greece . 1989-1991 . Worked as an architect for the architectural firm " C.Stamatis, D.Nakos, K.Karanopoulos, P.Moundrouvalis and Associates Ltd" in various projects in Greece and in the United Arab Emirates. 1980-1985 . During student years in the Architectural Department of the National Technical University of Athens worked as an assistant architect in tha above mentioned firm in various projects in Greece and abroad. Athens ADVERTISING 1996 -97 Worked as a writer in “EY” magazine and in “Athinorama” weekly guide. Athens JOURNALISM 1996-2000 Worked as a artickle`s writer in “KATHIMERINI” and “VIMA” newspapers, in “ART”, “KLIK”, “MEN”, “METRO”, “EY”, “VOQUE” “SYMBOL” “DIFONO” magazines in matters of literature, art in general and architecture. Worked as a critic in “DIAVAZO” and “BEST SELLER” literary magazines
Awards: 1994 - 1st award of the City of Athens in memory of the Greek poet Nikiforos Vrettakos for his second book of poetry : "Architecture of the Intémate Spaces"
Extra Activities: ORGANISATION OF POETRY READINGS - Has organises and takes part in a series of poetic readings and literary presentations which take place in the "Theatre of Cephallinias Street", sponsored by the "Praxis Theatre Group" of which he is an active member. - Read poetry in the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in August 1998 Contribution to school cinema club, basket-ball, netball, soccer member of the school's chess team, wimmer in Panathinaicos Swimming club, took part in national swimming games.
Foreign Languages: English, French
E-mail Address: bm-sruome@otenet.gr
Works:
COLLECTIONS OF POEMS
1992 . “ The Corner Of the World ” SOCOLIS EDITIONS
1993 . “ Architecture of the Intimate Spaces ” KASTANIOTIS EDITIONS
1995 . “ A Simple Method of Three ” KASTANIOTIS EDITIONS
1999 . “ Dense Now ”. ELLINIKA GRAMMATA
NOVELS
1998 . “ The Seventh Elephant ” KEDROS
2000 . “ The Seventh Elephant ” ARCADIA BOOKS (London)
2000 . “ Bar Flober ” KEDROS
MAGAZINES
1998 “Poetry in Translation” KINGS COLLEGE
His work was selected among established Greek poets of the 20 the century
1992-1997 . Original poems, literary translations
Articles and reviews on the poems have been published in the following leading Greek magazines:
REYMATA (WAVES)/ MANDRAGORAS/ DIAVAZO (I READ)/ PORFYRAS/ GRAMMATA & TEHNES (LITERATURE & ART)/ I LEXI (THE WORD)/ ODOS PANOS (PANAS STREET)/ SELIDES (PAGES)/ ROPTRO/ ELI - TROHOS/ NEO EPIPEDO
TRANSLATIONS
1993-1995 - Translated for various Greek magazines important works of the writers of the Beat Generation (Kerouak, Ginsberg,Corso), as well as British poets (Blake, Shelley) .
BAR FLAUBERT
translated by David Connolly
READ AN EXCERPT: BAR FLAUBERT
My father
“You mentioned on the phone about some phrase...”
My father took a deep puff on his pipe.
Difficult to fight with your soul. It’s an unequal contest. Like all wars..."
“Like all...?” I asked.
“Wars.”
"Wars?"
“Yes, civil ones. Like all civil wars.”
“When did you write that?”
“I didn’t write it. I felt it.”
“You felt it?”
“Yes. As soon as I woke up. It wasn’t a dream though. It was that tender hour just before waking. When everything is in a state of semi-inertness...”
“It must have been the after-effects of some dream. That intermediate stage between sleeping and waking.”
“No doubt that plays some role. The closer a thought is at the time you wake up, the greater the effect of the dream’s warmth on it. The person’s at an intermediate stage, his mind is wandering in a fantasy.”
I smiled:
“Just imagine if you heard another father and son talking about such things. It still seems strange to me that I’ve a father who’s a writer...”
“It struck you as strange even when you were small... I remember you secretly watching me through the door of my study...”
“Yes. I used to think that you lived somewhere else, in a strange land. Do you remember how I liked to listen to stories when I was a boy? At first, I thought that they came from beyond the world, from where music comes and numbers... When I first realized that my dad’s work was to make up stories in our own home, where we ate and slept, I got a fright! Don’t laugh! It was dangerous for a boy to live in a house with a father who made up stories and heroes.”
“Heroes? There are no heroes, only people. People, characters that visit me. It’s a kind of co-existence,” said father, who appeared to be enjoying the conversation. “When I’m writing, I can feel them moving inside me, experiencing what I experience during the course of the day.”
“And when you finish the text, they go away. They go to sleep...”
“When the text is finished, it’s they who belong to the readers. I’m the one who goes to sleep!” said father, laughing. “No, that’s a lie, there’s no sleep for me...” he went on, “after I’ve put the final full-stop, I go through a period of inner reflection, almost meditation, on the text. I didn’t ask him what he meant. It wasn’t necessary. “I sit and observe it,” he added, “like looking at a painting. I note the balance, the volume, the correspondences. I want the finished text to breathe with sharp gasps, to crack open without revealing its openings. And it’s there, in the cracks, that I try to entice the reader, to camouflage the hole so that the unsuspecting reader will fall in. But take note! I’m referring to a reversal that of necessity has to be justified by two things: by the particular weight of the characters and by the conflicts between them. Everything, but everything, has to be justified in a novel, Yannis! It has to be a perfect, flawless construction, like a building, have the supporting structure, the elements it supports, openings, even an expansion-joint! The reader may see it all as being smooth and plastered, but inside there’s a whole cosmogony: mortar, stones, bricks, cement, beams... The text’s intestines have to work to perfection. Otherwise, dear boy, it collapses. It collapses and dissolves into its constituent parts.”
“Reversal... Though in your last book, not every page goes hand in hand with the previous one. Everything is linear. Everywhere detailed images, historical references completely documented, you’ve left nothing to chance. I remember somewhere how you even describe the cut of the lawyer’s clothes... The narrative is chronologically constructed. Twenty-four hours in each chapter. The entire novel covers a week. The book’s like one long procession...”
“I’m glad you see it that way. Except that, to get to the end of that procession, you have to read through some five hundred pages,” my father said with a wily grin.
“Come on, I didn’t mean it negatively. You know how much I like it...” I said, apologetically.
There was a sudden silence. That often happened in conversations with my father. It was an unequal silence. For him, it was ‘functional’, part of the flow of the conversation. For me it was embarrassment, since, while it lasted, my father never stopped looking at me, and intently too, as if he was trying to gauge the impact that his words had had on me. Even as a young boy, I remember him with his beady eyes, behind his glasses, fixed on me as if I’d done something bad. Now, of course, it was no longer Markos Loukas in his prime that I had before me. I had a seventy-year-old man full of opinion and whims.
Outwardly, he was in pretty good shape. Tall, round-faced, stocky build, with a good crop of white hair for his age, a delicate well-formed mouth; he vaguely recalled his implacable friend, Pentzikis. His health in recent years hadn’t been the best, a balloon to unblock his arteries, a prostate operation, yet these hadn’t seemed to get him down.
My father continued to stare at me with an Apollonian calm. Markos Loukas was not the sort a boy would want for a teacher. A cool breeze that came unexpectedly through the half-open balcony door made him shudder. I got up and shut it and, returning to my armchair, I lit a cigarette and broke the deadlock:
“When’s mum coming?”
“I’m expecting her any time now.”
“I haven’t seen her for a long while. It must be at least a month. How time goes...”
“A month. What’s a month? You young people have a strange relationship with time. At my age, time flows by somewhat differently. Mine is coming to a standstill. When the biological hand reaches fate’s slot, then time will point to my allotted hour.”
“Dad, I don’t want you thinking like that...”
“Look, Yannis, I’ve always been a realist. Even in my collection of short stories, back in ’65, when all the critics had a go at me -what’s up with Loukas, the characters aren’t convincing, the structure’s unsound-, even then I knew that my writing was realistic. I knew that everything that happened in the book was what the characters had either felt or were in a position to have felt. I told you, everything has to be justified. In any case, I never set much store by what the critics said...”
“That didn’t stop you writing critical reviews yourself. All those years you wrote for Narration...”
“Don’t forget that, first of all, I wrote under a pseudonym and, secondly, I chose books that I liked. I’ve also written libels, of course. Like in the case of that fraud, Matthaiou, in the period following the dictatorship...” said father. Immediately, I sensed him wincing, as if he’d uttered something that was forbidden.
“What fraud? Who’s Matthaiou?” I asked, astonished.
“Water under the bridge...”
“Come on, tell me. Besides it has to do with our work,” I argued.
“Nothing to tell, he was a strange fellow who’d sent me a text...”
“What text? Was it ever published?”
“No, thanks to me... He’d sent me a novel, God forbid... I went to a lot of trouble to make sure “Hestia” didn’t publish it. He had people behind him in America. People with influence. Ginsberg, Burroughs and such like. Didn’t you find anything in the archives?”
“Not yet.”
“Yes, that’s one thing I most likely threw away. Anyhow. It was at around that time that we almost ruined our literature.”
My father had begun to raise his tone:
“Greece wasn’t America! We didn’t have a Dos Passos in prose; we didn’t have a Cummings in poetry. We had Karagatsis and Seferis. That’s why I fell out with Pentzikis. I’d no objections at all to free association, even Faulkner used it. But that total disintegration, no respect for anything... where’s the structure, the characters, the sequence of events? Prose is not just jumping from one thing to another. Prose is foot-slogging... you need a steady step and open eyes...”
I understood that my father didn’t want to go on discussing this particular subject.
“I suppose you’re talking about the trend in new novels after the Dictatorship.”
“New novel? That wasn’t a novel. Not even a story.”
“But there were some writers...” I began.
“Writers?” said my father, abruptly. “Only in name. I’m a writer too. But something more.”
“Something more?”
“Writer is a noun and nouns get tired of standing alone. They look for an adjective to lend them support. I’m more than a writer.”
“Won’t you ever stop talking in codes, father?”
“I like codes, Yannis, I wouldn’t have got where I have without them.”
“That cynicism,” I started to comment.
“Cynicism, Yannis, is adrenaline to an old man.”
“You’ve certainly got a way with words, dad...”
“I’ve a way with them because I used to listen to them.”
I knew what was going to follow.
“From being fifteen years’ old, I accompanied your grandfather round the salons,” my father went on unstoppably. “Always just behind him. And they were all there: Myrivilis, Karagatsis, Seferis, Terzakis, Prevelakis...”
“You don’t have to tell me the story again. I’ve heard it countless times...” I said, almost pleading.
“You need to hear it and to hear it again and again. I didn’t spend all my days and nights with journals and glossy magazines... For the whole time that I was a student, for five years, I’d go twice a week to the houses of writers -your grandfather hung out with all the most interesting people- and I’d listen. I didn’t speak, I listened. I made coffee, helped the women serve, emptied the ashtrays... Only if they spoke to me did I mumble something back to them. And like that, my mind eventually opened up. Through listening. That’s how it is, literature calls for hard work. We don’t just churn out a couple of incomprehensible phrases like Matthaiou and think we’re through. That’s where the adjective comes in that I was telling you about -and don’t think I’m arrogant. But I’m more than just a writer. I’m a true writer.”
At that moment, we heard the sharp sound of the front door opening and, a couple of seconds later, my mother appeared in the living room with two large plastic bags full of shopping. A faint smell of perfume spread through the air, lightening the atmosphere. She stood at the entrance to the living room and stared at us, smiling. My mother is a tall woman, almost the same height as my father, very thin, her hair dyed a brown tint and, in recent years, quite short. Her face is slender, aristocratic, accentuated nose, green eyes, bright, a slanting scar on her forehead, the result of a car accident when she was a child. Her movements were delicate, like those of a dancer. Her gait had something musical about it, something imperceptibly affected, as if her every movement were obeying some personal choreography.
I got up and kissed her. She gently touched her lips against my cheek. My mother, like my father, was not particularly demonstrative. Effusiveness was not something held in honour in the Loukas kingdom. Our relationship was characterized by an emotional reservation, each member kept a safe distance from the other. It was by no means a coincidence that I’d never seen my parents kissing on the lips, nor ever holding each other’s hand.
My mother is best described by the adjective “indefinable”. Her motherliness is faint, like a wet window-pane, I never knew where I was with her, at times I felt her clinging to me like an oyster, without leaving me any space to breathe, at others like a limpet prised free and sinking to the bottom of the sea. I loved my mother, I loved that transient emotion she conveyed to me, I loved her in the way she fluttered around me like a butterfly. Her tenderness was so special; hers was a behaviour that for many years I couldn’t deal with, until I accepted it as it was, I accepted that goodwill, that discreet tool that in our relationship drew that fine line separating parent and child.
The three of us in the living-room. Was it real? All three? When I was small, I imagined my family like a large room; in which lived my parents, all my relatives and their branches, my cousins, uncles, together with my friends, my parents’ friends, and my teachers. As I grew up, the people gradually began to leave. At first, it was the distant relatives, then my parents’ friends, the uncles and the cousins. As time passed, among the last to leave were the teachers, followed by the friends and grandparents, till in the end there were only three of us left: my mother, my father and me. This arrangement lasted for quite a while longer, till about eight or nine years ago, when I was around thirty and when, to my great surprise, the next person to leave the room was not me, the emancipated thirty-year-old, or my father, the counterweight. It was her, my mother, who discreetly flew off into the unknown through a gap in the window, leaving us, the two men, sitting in two armchairs facing each other and silently staring into each other’s eyes.
My mother didn’t stay long. She was tired, all day at the art gallery and then shopping, and she wanted to go and have a lie down. I proposed that we all eat together, but she didn’t want to. She didn’t eat much, two mouthfuls and that was it. I sat with my father a bit longer, we discussed one or two things about the book and then, since it was already late, we postponed the Pentzikis correspondence for the next day. I said goodnight and went down to the basement.