This book is not the product of a casual clueless and boring experience, as often occurs with ambitious and self-proclaimed authors who consider writing easy and painless. At a wider level the unusually mature first time author, portrays the portrait of the latter, with the words of Satan:
Τhey are plagued by lifelong bad taste, they are completely unaware that taste is made up of many details that mature for a long time in the mind of man, it is not something big that one can arrange in a jiffy. (page. 47).
The conditions, on the other hand, of an extremely painful writing process, are described in Rodion’s supposedly ironic aversion towards Erminia (the main characters of the book), in the characteristically self – referential chapter entitled “The book”:
It is not that hard for one to write a book, she continues. You wake one day with a killing headache, your brain is about to explode, your nose is red as if a feather is tickling it, you start to sneeze uncontrollably, your stomach hearts and you feel you must empty it, but you can’t, because your gut has turned to concrete, your eyes are burning and you run to find water to rinse them. The water is burning too and nothing can relieve you. You start running like a rat who swallowed poison with its wheat. Suddenly, you trip and fall in a shallow ditch which seems empty like an abyss. You stay there for a few hours which seem like months. You squirm under the pain that grip you from all sides until you start emptying your stomach on the ground. You’re emptying, you’re emptying, your spleen sticks to your dry guts and you start vomiting bile. The soil turns into mud. You bury your fingers into it and you start writing on the rock next to you. Then you collapse exhausted. When dawn breaks, the sun dries up all you have written on the rock and turns it into a book. Then you go to sleep. (pages 39-40).
One must seek the “poetry” in Araouzou’s narrative art, in this type of painful writing experience (which presupposes the experience of the “abyss”). Art based on an advanced modernist expression, where the elaborate use of indirect quotes and the mastery of a high technique of internal monologue are central. It is a writing that does not move with a simple flat rhythm, but which with its gaps, its strange thematic and stylistic ambiguities, dynamically entrenches various possibilities of ideological, world-theoretical and other dimensions. It reaches a climax of the strange and submissive element combined with elements of mystery and thrill (thriller) which coordinate on a macro scale of slight self-irony.
Natural narration
On a micro scale level, we evidently find ourselves before an author who can, first of all, in a natural narrative, deliver and incorporate fine mental meditations which reach the level of apophthegmatic formulation: “fear is proportionate to how badly one wants to live” (42); “every end a beginning” (48); “true happiness is only when you accept death without fear” (63); “true love is to cry for someone before you’ve lost them” (76); whereas there are plenty of observations which attest to a settled sensitivity: “ the dull wildness of youth” (18); “he would get used to what was happening, just like one gets used to everything” (24); “I started to get bored of this journey where nothing happened” (35); “it is strange how everything becomes so simple when a relationship works” (77).
On the other hand, where the writing tends to stray too far into a kind of philosophical reflection on existential issues, groundings appear to bring the reader back to the level of the story, e.g. “Lobster. I would choose the lobster”. (24) “I picked up my bike”. (36) etc.
If there was space, we could discuss and analyze issues which have already been touched upon by critics (I am referring to critique by G.P. SAVVIDES in «Νέα» and Niki Kotsiou in «Αβγή»). I would however rather touch upon an aspect of the book which has not been touched upon at all. The deep underground and dynamic connection with the birth place. Because real works of art (and Araouzou’s book is indisputably an important achievement of modern Greek narrative prose), are doomed to converse with their contemporary reality.
However, the locality involved in the wider mythological fabric does not narrow the book’s significance (or reader spectrum). The art of references is here, multilayered and complex: myth and reality, historical and interpersonal exploration, exercise in the space of the conscious and unconscious, realistic and dreamlike, local and global context are woven together in absolute harmony, interwoven on the same canvas, the canvas of writing.
Without, therefore, the presence of one-dimensional and blatant references, the adequate reader discerns in the background of this “neutral” scenic space, elements that represent a specific historical and georgraphical area.
In the first chapter of part two (“Satan’s Messiah”), certain findings which could also be read as indirect remarks of a patriotic cognitive character, respond to a complex field of references: There is somewhere, quite far from here, but not so far that one couldn’t reach it, an island. An island where the people are not concerned with committing any serious sin, except, of course, for market swindling, which is something, at the end of the day, which everyone does nowadays. This island, I wish to punish for its indifference. Because, those who are not concerned with doing good or bad can only be indifferent. (Pages 48-49).
Another element, is the face of the grandfather who dominates the heroine’s palindromic memories, whose spectral and overwhelming presence defines an era that seems to have definitively ended for the island: “The grandfather was not Sergei Zoulansky but a merchant from the island and he had made his money from interest on the money he lent to the locals”, as he is demystified at the end of the narrative (82). However, the heroine (and narrator), with a variety of tricks and feints, hints at the attempt to establish a dynamic continuation thereof: see, for example, the symbolic dimensions in the use of the room “which grandfather likes so much” (19) or in the cumulative use of the gun of the grandfather etc.
But there are more direct references such as the “satanic and paradoxically beautiful” and “dark” father – Arsenios who, at the end of the first part of the book will utter the historically transparent phrase “I shall be the new leader of this island” (42) who reappears in the fourth chapter of the second part (59-60) in the form of the morbid collector in the “time train” (which unloads the life of the people of the island); as well as at the end of the second part (65-67) at a wedding scene where the reference to the “lutenists” (66) leaves no doubt as to the identity of the island; and finally, in the third chapter of the third part where he is tried and sentenced by the enraged inhabitants of the island who call him “ traitor, murdered and other such like” (80) because he killed a “brave youth” who revealed “his plans to become the leader of the island” (79).
Vigilance Messages
Finally, if one insists even messages of political vigilance and historic patriotic cognizance can be discovered in suitably adjusted literary myths and metaphors, and not in rhetoric or blatant references, on issues such as the absence of resistance, comfort, etc.
On page 57, e.g., the “captive” decides to react for a moment and throws himself on his tyrant. The report is very declarative: “His breath was warm like the steaming island earth when the first rain falls” (56); whereas his words can be read at diverse levels, such as this, for example, the instructive comment about the issue of “blind heroism” and the real “fight” which cannot be fought by people who are locked up in dusty rooms smelling of mould and chlorine” (57).
European air
Let it be said bluntly. Araouzou’s “Captive” is a book with a European element to it. The first exciting element for an adequate reader is exactly this: the absence of the unbearable provincial smell which leaves the familiar regurgitation of themes of patriotic embezzlement. However, the contextual material of the book is not produced in the absence of space. The author of such a novel probably deliberately sought not to present an easily identifiable setting that would immediately provide her with a ticket to locality and potentially to (the much sought after by others) state care.
Michalis Pieris
Late Dean of the University of Cyprus (1952-2021)
