Spyros Giannaras, after four collections of short stories, tackles the long form for the first time by writing the novel “With a stitched heel”
I will begin with a quote – which always moves me and which gives me an answer to the perennial question “what is literature” – by the great Anna Akhmatova: “In the terrible years of Yezofsina, I spent seventeen months waiting in line in front of the Leningrad prisons. One day, someone “recognized” me. Then a woman standing behind me, who had certainly never heard my name, awoke from the stiff slumber into which we had all fallen, and asked me with her bruised lips, bending to my ear (there, they all spoke in whispers) : And this, can you describe it? And I told her: I can. Then, something like a smile slipped over what was once her face.” A haunted, yet powerful, “literary” I can, in the face of the despair of a harsh reality that swallows breaths and lives.
Spyros Giannaras, after four collections of short stories, tackles the long form for the first time by writing the novel “With a sewn-on heel”, “a novel of wandering or a story about wandering” as he says. Sotiris Kriezotis, the hero or, better, the non-hero of Giannaras – who comes from far away and converses with other like-minded heroes of world literature -, loses everything that was some constant for him.
Having hit the Achilles tendon – “the most literary tendon in the human body” -, losing, that is, his physical integrity, and having previously lost his job and separated from his beloved, “unemployed, unloved and with a cut Achilles tendon” that is, after a period of confinement, with his limp unsteady step, with black despair in his heart, with the need within him for union and acceptance, with his eyes stubbornly fixed on people, their pains and wounds, with tormenting questions trilling his mind, with the answers canceling each other thus ceasing to be answers, the journey begins. An immersion journey into the most inaccessible parts of the human psyche in the wintering Athens of June 2015, where even the Holy Rock is covered by a “shining haze”. He wants to unite the shattered pieces of himself, he wants to find a voice. Because Sotiris Kriezotis – to remember Kafka too – is nothing but literature.
When he is on the gurney on his way to the operating room, his only concern is to find a book. He desperately asks his friend for it. When he brings him the New Testament, the only book available at the time, Kriezotes seizes upon it as if it were his salvation. And indeed it is. Kriezotis lives and breathes through literature. His references are literary, his way of perceiving the world, experiencing joy and sorrow, rejection and acceptance is literary. It converts feelings, mental states, desires, fears, dreams, images, into words. He fights with words for words. “Writing puts him on his feet every time.”
Rarely in a novel have we seen so many reflections of such quality on the writing process. Problems of absolute despair and great anguish, as if the life of someone, an entire city and an era, depended on them. Kriezotis’s thoughts, given in italics in the text, a text within the text, thoughts real embroidery as Giannaras “arms the whole language”. Thoughts, intertextual references, encounters with people as encounters with a fragmented and therefore multiple self, topicality, the connection through the ancestor with 1821, the identification with the refugee – “dangerous to itself is the country that denies the blessed gratitude of the refugee’-, the bad texts, the observation of attitudes, gestures, expressions, all in the light of an inimitable competitive desire for union with the Other.
Seeing the huge queue in front of the ATM, stunned, trying to experience the desperation of the “betrayed, seductive and repulsive crowd at the same time”, what torments his mind and soul is the impossibility of rendering the moment. “I realized that this beleaguered crowd struggling to collect its rubbish, all these distraught faces, I am unable to render them… And then I reached my limits”.
This literary “I can” is sought by Giannaras, as Akhmatova fulfilled it before him, like so many others who struggled with the “boggy pencil tip”. Giannaras writes literature about literature: with an excess of emotion, with an agony that stares itself in the face, exposes it, exposes it, searches for it. Having as his ally all the wealth of the Greek language. He doesn’t write with ideas, he writes with physical pain. With experience. With soul and knowledge.
INFO
Spyros Giannaras, “With a stitched heel”
Ed. Agra
352 pp. Price: 18.50 euros
