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Reviews

Damned and damaged

A reissued translation brings a Greek writer'shaunting novella back to life.


 

AlexandrosPapadiamantis’s The Murderess, translated from the original Greek by Peter Levi, is afolktale, but not a simple one. It is a fairytale without a princess, a tragedywithout a heroine and a morality play without a moral. This is all to say thatthe novella, deemed Papadiamantis’s masterpiece by many, draws upon a range ofgenres, bends to none, and proves complex and beautiful in its own right.

 

Levi’s translation, originallypublished in 1983, was reissued last month. In his introduction, Levi arguesthat The Murderesscaptures an important crisis of the past in a way that helps us understand ourpresent. The crisis at hand in The Murderess is at once local and universal.It is the story of a damned, damaged family on the Aegean island of Skiathos,where Papadiamantis was born in 1851 and where he set many of his works — the most famous of which were short stories andserialized novels (such as The Gypsy Girl and Merchant of Nations), and which featured tales ofMediterranean adventure, provincial portraits, and legends of religioussignificance.

 

In The Murderess, Papadiamantis fuses portrait andlegend in his knowledgeable, intricate depiction of Skiathos, a poor place,strict in its adherence to local customs and stagnated by its own traditions.The implied and stated dangers, both tangible and intangible, of thisparticular breed of provincialism give heady subtext to a simple foreground:the story of a struggling family in a struggling community.

 

At the novella’s beginning, wemeet protagonist Hadoula, who sits hearthside at home keeping watch over hersickly newborn granddaughter. Papadiamantis grants the reader almost immediateaccess to Hadoula’s inner life:

 

Hadoula, or Frankiss,or Frankojannou, was a woman of scarcely sixty, with a masculine air and twolittle touches of moustache on her lips. In her private thoughts, when shesummed up her entire life, she saw that she had never done anything exceptserve others. When she was a little girl, she had served her parents. When shewas mated, she became a slave to her husband, and at the same time, because ofher strength and his weakness, she was his nurse. When she had children shebecame a slave to her children, and when they had children of their own, shebecame slave to her grandchildren.  

 

On the heels of a thumbnail sketchof his main character, Papadiamantis reveals this dark realization of Hadoula’s — not a sudden realization but one that has plaguedher for some time. She can imagine no escape from her perpetual state ofservitude. And, worse yet, she knows well its cyclical nature. She is Hadoula,daughter of Delcharao; and mother to a second Delcharao; and grandmother to asecond Hadoula, “In case the name should die out,” she scoffs. To Hadoula, there’s noromance in the passing down of family names, only a reminder of the endlesscycle of suffering and want in which she is just a temporary player.

 

All are poor in Skiathos, but theworst financial burdens fall on families whose women bear girls. At the core ofthe island’s poverty is its longstanding dowry system. Even the poorest offamilies must provide for their daughters in marriage— or continue to provide for them into old age. In Hadoula’s mind thedowry system takes on monstrous dimensions:

 

… And every family inthe neighborhood, every family in the district, every family in the town hadtwo or three girls. Some had four, some had five. … So all these parents, thesecouples, these widows, faced the absolute necessity, the implacable need, tomarry off all those daughters… And to give them all dowries. Every poor familyand every widowed mother with half an acre of land, with a poor little house,was living in misery, and going out to do extra work. … And what dowries, bycustoms of the island! ‘A house at Kotronia, a vineyard at Ammoudia, an olivegrove at Lehouni…’ Everyone had to give in addition a dowry counted in money. Itmight be two thousand, or a thousand, or five hundred. Otherwise, he could keephis daughters and enjoy them. He could put them on the shelf. He could shutthem up in the cupboard. He could send them to the Museum.

 

In his translation, in excerptslike the one above, Levi captures Papadiamantis’s dichotomy of tone, a cleverfusion of the orally driven language of fairytale and the darker-edged languageof satire (as in the lines, “He could shut them up in the cupboard. He couldsend them to the Museum.”). We see this playful mix-and-match style throughout thebook, most notably in introducing Hadoula’s personal past:

 

For a long time[Iannis] had been an apprentice and assistant to [Hadoula’s] father … When theold man noticed the young man’s simplicity, his economy and modesty, herespected him for it and resolved to make him a son-in-law. As a dowry, heoffered him a deserted, tumbledown house in the old Castle, where people usedto live once upon a time, before the ’21 revolution.

 

But the whimsical quality of thelanguage is in direct and jarring opposition with the sinister advancement ofplot, as Hadoula comes to terms with the idea that the best daughter is a deaddaughter — and as she begins, almostmindlessly, to act on this realization.

        

The strength of The Murderess lies in its treatment ofcharacters, through skillful employment of tone and voice, as three-dimensionalindividuals rather than folkloric archetypes. We see Hadoula set out to murderthe burdensome, sickly baby girls of Skiathos. But we do not see her as amonster. Because we also see her intentions, we know her repentance; weunderstand her descent into madness. We experience the frightening burden ofher guilt-driven nightmares. And ultimately we feel remorse for Hadoula in herattempt to escape punishment, swimming across a too-rough sea, catching a lastglimpse of the deserted field that was her own dowry.

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Reviews

The road as metaphor

In his latest book, intrepid reporter Ted Conover ruminates on roads from Peru to Palestine


One great challenge in writing about roads, Ted Conover explains in the epilogue of his new road-themed nonfiction release The Routes of Man, is to avoid inadvertent use of the casual road metaphor.

“So essential a part of the human endeavor are roads,” he writes, “that road- and driving-related metaphors permeate our language. Who among us hasn’t come to a fork in the road or been tempted by the road to ruin? Speed bumps, in the newspapers, are faced by everyone from Middle East peace negotiators to baseball teams making their way to the playoffs. Leaders who are asleep at the wheel routinely send our enterprises into a ditch.” Point taken. But Conover’s not done. In fact he fills an entire page with turns of phrase — 37 clauses and as many clichés —rooted in the concept of the road.

In doing so, he lands on a crucial point: A road is not just a way of getting from one point to another. It means something more, not only in our everyday vernacular but also in our collective consciousness. The road is an instrument of entry and escape, a means to an end, a symbol of progress. And a winding foreground for drama. 

Conover’s past books narrate adventures into pockets of American culture: he has ridden the rails as a hobo, ventured across the U.S.-Mexico border with illegal immigrants, and, perhaps most famously, worked as a prison guard in New York’s Sing Sing prison. In The Routes of Man: How Roads Are Shaping the World and the Way We Live Today, he applies the same narrative nonfiction lens to the stories of six roads in six countries — six roads “that are reshaping the world.”

Conover begins in Peru, riding in a big-rig along the road that carries mahogany to global exporters — an unpaved and unpredictable mountain route that might eventually be put out of use by the building of the Interoceanic Highway that will link the Amazon basin with the Pacific Coast of Peru. From there he treks the frozen river chaddar, a forty-mile surface trail in Zanskar, India; then the Kinshasha Highway through Tanzania, Africa (along which the AIDS epidemic is said to have traveled and spread); the elevated 60 Road across the disputed land border in the West Bank in Palestine; the sleek, modern Guangzhou-Shenzhen Superhighway in China; and lastly, the congested Apapa-Oworonshoki Expressway in Lagos, Nigeria.

For Conover, the story of a road is rooted in the story of those who travel it. He writes with gracious honesty and great interest about his travel companions — among them truckers, ambulance workers, road-trippers from China, teenage students from Zanskar, and Israeli paratroopers — and adeptly employs their individual narratives in the service of a greater concept: that of the road as a means of personal and cultural self-discovery. A road presents its traveler with ample opportunity for moments of revelation. Conover’s prose is simple and elegant in relating his own experience of such moments, as in the following passage about a steep descent through the Andes Mountains in Peru:

It was all downhill, with every turn seeming to bring a little more warmth, a little more humidity, plants and trees we hadn’t seen before. The view was still limited until one particular turn revealed the sudden vista, one of those spectacular places through which you come to understand the shape of the planet: the wrinkled green mountainsides spread out before us, dissolving suddenly in the vast, smooth green sameness of the Amazon basin, a flatness that stretches two thousand miles to the sea. Interrupting the mountainside below were little brown threads, glimpses into the same road we were on, a thread that writhes back and forth like an earthworm held by the tail.

This is the great promise of the road: the quick turn that affords you an unexpected view and, with it, a new perspective.

Of course, roads are not all romance and revelation. They present threats of pollution and danger, casualty and corruption, and the spread of disease. And there is also the more generalized threat of globalization, the eradication of local culture by the global market. Nowhere in Conover’s book does this threat seem more acute than in Zanskar, where teens who hope to further their education must leave the village for the first time by way of the chaddar, a trail across the slippery surface of a frozen river.

Through Conover’s eyes, the chaddar is certainly beautiful, even magical — but its route is also perilous, difficult to navigate and subject to the whims of the weather. In recent years, there has been talk of building an all-season road along the chaddar to give Zanskarians a simpler way out of the village — and, in turn, give outsiders a simpler way in. Conover notes that most Zanskarians seemed in favor of the road. Politically and economically, its construction makes sense. Zanskarian teacher Tenzin Choetop shared his feeling that an all-season road would “liberate” his students and provide them with an escape from the “small-mindedness” of their isolated upbringing.

Outsiders, however, are more likely to have a different view: that of the road as an intrusion upon a still-intact, indigenous culture, a Western bastardization of Shangri-La. Writes Conover, “I was not eager to see a road built through the chaddar … Bad things were bound to come in; life would change, and not always for the better. But Zanskar was not a museum … [and] Shangri-La was not a local idea. It was a Western idea, a symbol of what we lost when we advanced, a seductive nostalgia, a dream.”

Conover applies the same clean and comprehensive logic to all of the communities he encounters: from the recreational driving clubs in China, whose members flaunt driving as an inborn right, to the stopped-up go-slows (traffic jams) of Lagos that transform, organically, into open-air markets. These and other stories come together in The Routes of Man to create an enlightening and engaging chronicle of the way roads shape the people who travel them and the places where they live.

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Commentary

Back to Basics

Best of In The Fray 2007. Why newspapers need to embrace narrative.


In its purest form, the newspaper was to serve as a city guardian. This was because the paper broke news. It informed and protected its constituency by imparting necessary fact.

Of course this isn’t print’s role any longer. Only the Internet and 24-hour broadcast news really break news now, faster and more cheaply. But newspapers have yet to adjust their role or articulate this shift. They continue to assume the obstinately objective, dispassionate voice of news breaker and to report facts that have already been reported elsewhere.

The combined effect of print’s inability to keep pace with today’s hard news cycle and its reluctance to abandon its official tone — even though it rarely delivers the latest word — has meant disaster for subscription dailies’ revenues. But — more importantly — in clinging to the old form, print journalists forego the chance to take up, at last, the greater journalistic tradition: the tradition of narrative news.

Narrative news is the retelling of real events with the intent to marry information to story, story being the artful rendering of events and the people who are part of them. Narrative is deliberate. Its structure, style, and voice are employed to reflect levels of meaning — social, psychological, historical — and to impart a sense of the greater significance of the action.

Narrative is a salable product for the simple fact that we live by it. We’re all always making sense of experience according to a story’s essential elements: continuity, character, and concept. H. Porter Abbott, a scholar of narrative, writes that narrative is “the principal way in which our species organizes its understanding of time”; that narrative gives us a sense of the shape of time, of our place in infinite space. In this respect, narrative is the essential element of human existence: It gives our lives meaning.

As such, it’s our inherent mode of comprehension and expression. Well-crafted narrative journalism demands the reader’s engagement; its structure and voice work to invest the reader in the page. Traditional methods of journalism preach the virtue of information and the plain language that delivers it: the maintenance of distance between journalist and reader, the antinarrative. But in attempting to distance themselves from their audience, journalists have only distanced the audience from their product.

This realization is not new, nor is the notion of including narrative in daily news. Many papers feature long-form news reports that editors habitually refer to as narrative. But to dress up any ordinary bit of journalism with superficial literary techniques — arbitrary metaphor, description, or wordplay — is not narrative. Nor is the insertion of a descriptive scene into an otherwise ordinary news piece. These are merely fast and facile attempts to disguise dull writing. But gussied-up inverted pyramids are only barely more appealing than un-gussied ones.

Were newspapers to attempt real narrative, the shift would require an investment in time. Such an investment is best suited to a newspaper, which can thrive on taking the time — a luxury that neither online nor broadcast news can afford. Because of its requisite slow carefulness, written narrative seems ill-suited to the web (read: print’s key competitor), which is fast-paced to a fault. And because the great appeal of the Web is its ability to display fragments of information and to deliver text in no predetermined sequence, that medium seems ill-suited to long-form story. The very concept of the nonlinear network conflicts with the nature of narrative, the basis of which is structured continuity. Story unfolds with deliberate intent, not in flashes.

Print journalists and publishers should take advantage of this media dissonance. Because straight information is base metal to narrative’s gem, it has evolved into a communal property, for which the public is ever less willing to pay. It will grow less salable over time, not only because its availability increases exponentially with the influx of new technology, but also because, as writing, it does little to engage its reader.

By contrast, narrative moves readers precisely because it embraces the communicative properties common to everyday conversation. Like conversational language, the language of narrative operates under established patterns: for example, the chronological structure of a story that is simply told. It draws upon common ideas and objects to evoke greater and yet-unseen ideas. And maybe most importantly, narrative, like spoken language, conveys something between people. It specifies its message to an audience through its tone, diction, frame of reference, and use of rich language.

People respond positively to these properties and are willing to pay for work that incorporates them because the writing feels real. Narrative is humanizing. It makes sense of our world. It echoes the ways we speak our own stories and the ways we relate to one another. It’s an ideal form through which to learn about our society.

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