Christos Chomenidis's Reading List

"This is one of the greatest books I have ever read. It’s greater than another more famous memoir, by Yannis Makriyannis, a hero of the war of independence, which has been, for more than a century, like a Holy Bible to the Greeks. But Vamvakaris’s memoirs are the most earnest and honest descriptions of his life, of the life of somebody who belongs to the underworld, who was born a Roman Catholic in 1905 on the small island of Syros. He was very poor and worked as a slaughterer, but at the same time he was a musician. He played the bouzouki [a then-unpopular mandolin-like instrument brought to Greece in the 1900s by immigrants from Asia Minor]. He was very gifted and he created Rebetiko – a whole new musical style. It’s something like the blues in America – the melody is very simple. The spirit is: ‘we belong to the underworld, we live against, or beneath, the law; we like to stroll around and smoke marijuana; we love women’, and the women in Rebetiko are much more liberated than women in other songs. You could say that Vamvakaris’s memoirs are like The Greek Lady Sings the Blues by Billie Holiday. But on top of that, when Vamvakaris dictated his memoir, when he was 70 years old, he turned out to be a gifted narrator. The memoir is extremely good, extremely significant. He describes real life in Greece at the point where the working-class meets the underworld, before the Second World War. The writing is raw, straightforward – not lyrical or poetical in a stylistic way, but poetical in a cultural way: it’s about the way he lived his life. The book is not very well-known. But Vamvakaris is remembered as the patriarch of folk music. He is a giant. Look him up on YouTube—one song, ‘The Roman Catholic Girl from Syros’, is like the second national anthem."

"People don’t like the whole truth. In the real world and in art as well. You could say that. People like to believe that they are better or more heroic than they really are. Let’s say that Kazantzakis, who is a great novelist, presents us with Alex Zorba, who is a great man. But there is a saying that every man is a hybrid of bird and snake. Kazantzakis describes only the bird and says nearly nothing about the snake. Taktsis gives us both. After the critics, it still didn’t sell many copies. But The Third Wedding offers a picture to those who really want to understand how the bourgeoisie in Greece was. It’s real people, in real situations without heroism and poetic narrations. There was a critic who said that if life itself were talking, it would talk like Taktsis in this novel. It is a masterpiece and in fact he became stuck after it. He wrote just this one novel, and about 20 very nice short stories. Nothing else. He was trapped by the significance of this novel. When a writer starts with a masterpiece it is very different to continue because of the fear that people will say the second novel is not as good. No. They were suspicious of his personality. He had a double life. He was a writer and journalist, and a transvestite who would walk the streets and have sex for money. Except that Pasolini was paying for sex, or love, whereas Taktsis was being paid. He was a professional whore. It was very radical, to say the least. But don’t imagine that his novel is sexy or pornographic like his life; it isn’t at all – it’s about the ordinary life of an ordinary family in Athens, from the 1920s to the 60s. Yes. We may say that Greek history is full of wars and revolutions and coups and other great political incidents; but real life went on. Ordinary people didn’t always experience the turbulence in their daily life. History is a backdrop to daily dramas and this is what Taktsis shows. Every Greek who is interested in Greek literature has read, or has to read, The Third Wedding . It belongs to the canon."

"Empeirikos was the member of a very rich family of ship owners. The Greek ship owners are internationalists. He was born in Romania and moved soon after to a small island in the Aegean Sea. He didn’t want to become just a ship owner. He followed Trotsky’s ideas and so he couldn’t allow himself to be the boss—he wrote a letter to his family telling them all this and that he was quitting the family business. So he went to Paris where he met Marie Bonaparte, who was a very prominent (and the first woman) psychoanalyst. “In 1974 the dictatorship ended and democracy was back, and we returned to myth-making” She was married to a Greek prince, and so was in fact princess of Greece. She was very close to Freud. Empeirikos was attracted by Freudian theory and was analysed himself—by Bonaparte, I imagine—and he became an analyst himself. And at the same time he started writing surrealist poems. When he came back to Greece in the late 1930s, he gave a lecture about surrealism, and it caused a big scandal in Athenian society. Imagine: he was a member of the famous Empeirikos family, and many people went expecting to hear a ship-owner’s boy talking about the economy, or developments in the shipping industry, or something. They heard him reading these poems! They were shocked. They mocked him. He became in their eyes an anecdote, a funny character. He was a prominent figure in many ways. He was not just a poet; he was an analyst and a great photographer, too. But, to make you understand the bias of Greek society, in order to prevent him for practicing as an analyst, they voted through a law that said that to work as an analyst, you had to be a doctor. He was not a doctor, and so he was forbidden from practicing. Yes, the Greek establishment in general is not progressive. He started as a pure surrealist, like Andre Breton, but, as the years passed, he found his own voice. When you read these late poems, you understand that there is a unique style that only Empeirikos has. In Oktana you find something that is somewhere between poems, short stories and prophesies. If my English were much better I would translate them myself because I think, even today, they would be understood by English readers as something special. He talks like a prophet. But what I really want to emphasize with this book choice is that Empeirikos has nothing to do with archetypes; he doesn’t talk about ancient Greek traditions or political dramas in Greece. He talks about everything, globally. He has an extremely good poem/short-story where the main character is an American Mormon; another, takes place in South America, another in Africa. He has even written a novel, 3,000 pages long, about a steamboat that goes from Liverpool to New York and during the trip there are sexual orgies of all kinds between men and women, men and men, women and women. In some ways, he’s similar to the Marquis de Sade but there is also a vast difference: de Sade is a sadist, of course, while Empeirikos believed that love and sex was happiness. Yes, and this is universal. Not just for Greece. He is writing about the human condition."

"The significance of Petros Markaris is not that he writes crime novels that are very mysterious. His career rests on the way that he describes everyday life in Athens. The mystery is an alibi, a way of talking about ordinary people in an ordinary city that is not New York, London or Paris. He knows and loves the city itself. He’s a very urban novelist, and the fact that so many people in so many counties read Markaris proves that Athens and the Athenian life can attract foreigners. This novel, the first in a series, focuses on the murder of a prominent TV journalist, struck down in the studio just before she was due to break some very sensitive news. Inspector Costas Haritos, a junta-trained homicide squad leader, is called to the scene. He’s a very conflicted character, racked with regrets over a dark past in which he almost certainly assisted the military regime in the torture of leftist prisoners; married to a woman with no aim apart from to watch the next soap opera but father to a fiercely ambitious daughter at law school; and bemoans the loss of Greek traditions while loving imported foods. He seems in many ways to be an embodiment of the awkward symbiosis of past and present, idealism or myths and reality you’ve described. “The main character of Markaris’s novel is Athens, the city itself” He’s a typical Greek character, a middle-aged guy. You can’t say he’s extremely well educated but he knows many things. He’s an ordinary person, not especially good-looking or brave. He lives like a petit-bourgeois in Greece. He’s a nice person, over all, with a wife and daughter. And at the same time, he solves mysteries. He has these small passions, you know, like Sherlock Holmes and Miss Marple; and one of these small passions is for dictionaries. He collects dictionaries and tries to learn all the meanings of words. Really, though, the main character of Markaris’s novel is Athens, the city itself. It’s the city liberated from its myths: the Athens of small flats, narrow roads where you can’t find where to park your car, and kiosks where you buy papers and cigarettes, and many, many cafes. Where people live so close to Acropolis and yet so far from it. Here, someone can spend all his life a kilometre from the hill of Acropolis and seldom look at it. You forget where you are—as with the pyramids of Cairo. If you are so close to such a monument you have not other choice but to become blind to it. Exactly the same."

"It is hilarious. Very to the point. His characters are so well and funnily designed. He has a special talent for animals – most of his characters are animals. I would pay money to make Arkas into an honored, national figure. Yes, it’s very funny that nobody knows who he is. To tell you the truth I have met him once… But he’s not the kind of guy who gives interviews or who talks in any other way than in his strips. He doesn’t care about status. He doesn’t need to care. His work is so hilarious and significant that it speaks for itself. When somebody creates art—books, paintings, movies, whatever—he has to talk about the human condition. If you asked me what is the subject of Dostoyevsky I would tell you it is the human condition. There’s a very good strip about a very disappointed rooster. He’s in psychoanalysis. He’s the only rooster among twenty chickens but none of the chickens like him. He tries to make love to them but they tell him he’s awful. And in the same place, there’s a pig who is very fat and very dirty, doesn’t care how he talks—and all the chickens are in love with him. And the rooster just doesn’t know how to continue life in this condition, where the fat pig is so attractive. It’s funny, and it’s international. It’s a picture of the human condition, not just the Greek condition. Life is at the same time ridiculous and poetic, high and low, all together. Well, here’s my punch-line: I believe that if foreigners had the chance to get to know the real Greece they would be much more enthusiastic, much more charmed than by the archetypes of Zorba or the resistance against the Germans, the Colonels, or the bankruptcy. I’m afraid that all around, from America to Italy and Greece, it’s the same. Trump was elected because he sold the American Dream, a myth. Populism and nationalism and the idea that you can be against globalisation—and I perfectly understand that globalisation is a harsh thing, hard on many people—are myths. And they are stronger nowadays, more persuasive than a glance at the real situation. But I also think that with these kinds of myths, if you try them, if you put them to the test, you can overcome them rather easily. Yes, these books give us the chance to re-see, to re-watch our lives. Reading a very good book is a bit like being baptised; you look around you and see differently. That’s the magic thing. They give you the ability to see your own life again."