Bleak and phantasmagoric, this plays out almost as a modernized The Other Side. A bunch of artists form an isolated community (here, as expats on the Bleak and phantasmagoric, this plays out almost as a modernized The Other Side. A bunch of artists form an isolated community (here, as expats on the would-be utopia of a beautiful Greek island) but instead of productivity and freedom (or the slightest glimmer of happiness) they fall apart into personal problems, temporary loves, and all too often, death and dissolution (which becomes a kind of large-scale outside (divine?) apocalyptic force, as in the the plagues and collapse of The Other Side). This terrifying and beautifully macabre story seems to emerge, however, out of the ashes and detritus a much less clear and urgent one (to me, a much less successful one), aimlessly circulating amongst alcoholics and layabouts whose character and actions can seem entirely lacking in causality. This is something I've noted before in Karapanou, with greater success when narrating from the irrational spaces of childhood (and possibly insanity) in Kassandra and the Wolf and with somewhat less when attempting to tell some kind of hopeless love story whose characters' motives never seem to resolve enough to invite the necessary reader empathy in Rien ne va plus. Here we have a few explanations for the inexplicable: alcoholism (that great breaker of logical sequences of action) and a kind of divine intervention, but neither of these entirely satisfy until Karapanou's almost-symbolist cosmogony of moral disintegration and chaos overrides all else. The degree to which the ending modifies and illuminates what comes before is striking here, redeeming the novel entirely from my mounting frustration, but I'm still not sure that the first half or so actually works in any self-contained way. Then, neither did large swaths of The Other Side. Maybe books like these don't need to work in each independent facet to present a powerful and memorable whole. Or perhaps the early failings are, in fact, my own, and were I to re-read with my new sense of the larger arc, I'd find very different rhythms and significances. In any event, this is a strange and fascinating one, it just takes some time for that to become at all clear....more
Events repeat, reconfigured. This isn't a case of two interpretations of the same events, no, they're irreconcilable. Or are they? Events reconcile inEvents repeat, reconfigured. This isn't a case of two interpretations of the same events, no, they're irreconcilable. Or are they? Events reconcile in a space outside any one experience, lies illuminate the dead facts that would otherwise compose the truth of any story. Who here is the actual monster? Are they both, or are both ultimately tragic in their final solitude? Love stories, horror stories....more
There's a strange difficulty in pinning this one down exactly. Synopsize many of the vignettes here, and this is clearly a dark, dark account of childThere's a strange difficulty in pinning this one down exactly. Synopsize many of the vignettes here, and this is clearly a dark, dark account of childhood, bristling with trauma and abuse. Kassandra's child voice and tendency towards fantasy belie grim reality, our narrator's own brutality in turn is the only possible outcome. But there's a black buoyancy here nonetheless, a kind of undying rictus glee. The heroine, if to be trusted, is mostly unfazed by what we take as horrors, and is much more disturbed by the ordinary conventions of cryptic adult life observed. In many places she feels less the victim than the cruelly destroying god of her world. But of course, this is how mistreatment is carried down, isn't it? I know this, yet the particulars are less clear as they happen. And it's all conveyed with such a lightness -- surely surely unreliable, yet all we have. And then there are the parts that can conform to no known reality: fabrication, dream, childhood incomprehension, a covering over of that which lies beyond telling, actual insanity? It's all and none of these, the tone remains slippery, a story not to be clarified and comprehended so much as borne, experiences that touch both real and terrible things, but also a fantastical reordering of the universe, and further things which lie beyond and outside. It's almost as if no two sections here describe quite the same universe; altogether perhaps they map it exactly....more