The ancient Greek classics remain foundations of Western literature, but more recent Greek literature has had a far smaller reach. Greek poetry did flourish in the twentieth century: both Giorgos Seferis (1900–1971) and Odysseas Elytis (1911–1996) were awarded Nobel Prizes, and other major figures included the great C. P. Cavafy (1863–1933) and Yannis Ritsos (1909–1990). While the work of major Greek poets has consistently been translated, much less attention has been paid to Greek novelists. Especially in recent decades, little of the leading fiction published in Greece has been visible abroad. Many contemporary authors still can be judged by English-speaking audiences only on the basis of isolated translations.
Nikos Kazantzakis (1883–1957) is among the few modern Greek authors widely recognized and read abroad, and this cosmopolitan author even wrote some of his earliest works, including
Toda Raba (1934, English 1964), in French rather than Greek. Although the film versions of
Zorba the Greek (1946, English 1952, 2014) and
The Last Temptation of Christ (1955, English 1960) may be better known than the works on which they were based, these and Kazantzakis’s other novels, including his story of the 1889 revolt against the Turks on Crete,
Freedom or Death (1953, English 1956), are well worth revisiting. His ambitious verse epic
The Odyssey (1938, English 1958), a sequel to Homer’s work in which Odysseus embarks on further adventures that include the establishment of a utopian community, is particularly impressive.
Vassilis Vassilikos’s (b. 1933) Z (1966, English 1968) is also better known in its film version, but the novel, based on an actual assassination, provides a vivid picture of the crudeness of Greek politics during that era. Much of Vassilikos’s fiction is political, but he also strays into the surreal in works such as the very loosely tied together collection of stories, . . . And Dreams Are Dreams (English 1996). The inventive autobiographical The Few Things I Know About Glafkos Thrassakis (1978, English 2002), in which Vassilikos’s fictional counterpart is reportedly finished off by cannibals, careens a bit out of control but serves as a good introduction to the author.
Poet Aris Alexandrou’s (1922–1978) only novel, Mission Box (1974, English 1996), is one of the most important Greek novels of recent decades but has barely registered among English-speaking readers. Set in 1949 at the end of the Greek civil war, it describes that conflict from the Communist perspective. Alexandrou’s protagonist is the only survivor of an ill-fated mission to transport the box of the title—which symbolically turns out to be empty. Alexandrou’s focus on language in conveying the revolutionary’s struggles lift Mission Box far above the usual novel about political, ideological, and military clashes.
Margarita Karapanou (1946–2008) has an intense style and an often fragmentary presentation. In Kassandra and the Wolf (1974, English 1976), a young girl describes her early childhood in a quick rush of short and often disturbing episodes. Rien ne vas plus (1991, English 2009) describes an ill-fated marriage, offering two perspectives of events that allow for different interpretations of what actually went wrong.
• Yoryis Yatromanolakis’s (b. 1940) varied works range from The Spiritual Meadow (1974, English 2000), still written under the shadow of the ruling military junta in Greece, to Eroticon (1995, English 1999), a work of fiction presented ostensibly as a guidebook in the tradition of the Kama Sutra.
• Amanda Michalopoulou’s (b. 1966) works include a novel about two childhood friends, Why I Killed My Best Friend (2003, English 2014), and a collection of stories, I’d Like (2005, English 2008).
• Eugenia Fakinou’s (b. 1945) rich novel The Seventh Garment (1983, English 1992) offers several generations of female perspectives on Greek history.
• Ioanna Karystiani’s (b. 1952) The Jasmine Isle (1997, English 2006) is an intimate family story set on a beautiful island in the first half of the twentieth century, with women’s lives in the foreground, as the men are largely absent at sea.
• Menis Koumandareas’s (1931–2014) small and slightly underdeveloped novella describes an affair between a young man and an older, married woman, Koula (1978, English 1991).
Two younger Greek authors seem poised for an international breakthrough. All the protagonists of Alexis Stamatis’s (b. 1960) novels are fugitives of sorts. Some are ostensibly on quests, such as the author who narrates Bar Flaubert (2000, English 2007), traveling across Europe searching for a mysterious writer he learns of while editing his father’s autobiography, but they all are on journeys of self-discovery. The alcohol-steeped novel The Seventh Elephant (1998, English 2000) also sends its protagonist reeling across Europe, while in American Fugue (2006, English 2008) yet another writer travels abroad, this time to America, to participate in a writing program (much as Stamatis himself did, participating in the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa).
The characters in
Vangelis Hatziyannidis’s (b. 1967)
Four Walls (2000, English 2006) find themselves locked within their own four walls—sometimes by others, but as often of their own accord—in an off-kilter story that includes a sought-after recipe for making honey as a central element of the plot.
Stolen Time (2004, English 2007) focuses on a two-week period in which a student agrees to be interviewed in a hotel by members of a sect. He is not the first or only one to go through this, but he discovers that it is not as harmless or simple a procedure as he originally thought, with consequences that go far beyond what he imagined.
Petros Markaris (b. 1937) is the one Greek mystery author who has had some success abroad. While his Inspector Costas Haritos mysteries can be a bit long-winded, the books’ confident but easygoing style and the domestic and professional complications with which Haritos has to deal make for an exemplary national crime series, giving a better sense of contemporary Greek conditions than does the fiction of any other author whose books are available in English.
MATHEMATICAL FICTION
A number of Greek authors have dabbled in the odd subgenre of mathematical fiction.
Apostolos Doxiadis’s (b. 1953) very approachable Uncle Petros and Goldbach’s Conjecture (1992), translated into English and revised by the author in 2000, is a warm human portrait.
Tefcros Michaelides’s (b. 1954) more mathematically demanding Pythagorean Crimes (2006, English 2008), set in the earlier part of the twentieth century, is a murder mystery in which notable mathematicians and artists of the time figure prominently.
Christos Papadimitriou’s (b. 1949) “novel about computation,” Turing (2003), was written in English and crams a lot of science into a fairly ambitious work of fiction, though at a rather basic level. Together with Apostolos Doxiadis, Papadimitriou also wrote the best-selling graphic novel, Logicomix (first published in Greek translation in 2008 and then in the original English in 2009), a comic book retelling of Bertrand Russell’s life and search for truth.
FICTION BY GREEK EXPATRIATES
Several Greek authors living abroad have also produced significant works of fiction.
Vassilis Alexakis (b. 1943) writes mainly in French and deserves to be far better known than he is. His only work available in English, Foreign Words (2002, English 2006), explores language not only by having a protagonist who shares Alexakis’s own Greek roots and French background but also by having him study the Central African language of Sango.
Panos Karnezis (b. 1967) moved to England in 1992, and all the acclaimed books he has written in English are set in Greece. From the descriptions of village life in his debut collection, Little Infamies (2002), to the large-scale novel about a Greek shipping tycoon, The Birthday Party (2007), Karnezis’s fiction offers to English-speaking readers an accessible introduction to Greek life and culture of the past century.
Theodor Kallifatides (b. 1938) writes in Swedish and often about the Greek and emigrant experience. Only Masters and Peasants (1973, English 1977)—confusingly republished in a revised edition in 1990 as Peasants and Masters—is accessible in English. More recently, he has also jumped on the Scandinavian crime fiction bandwagon with his Inspector Vendel mysteries.