Orthokostá

Начало книги

Thanassis Valtinos’s Orthokostá opens with a brief description of a village in flames. Where are we? Why is this village burning? And why should we care?

Here is a book based on a series of oral recollections that are stitched together into a fragmented, potentially confusing narrative. The reader is quickly assaulted by a profusion of personal and place names, and the narrators confuse dates, contest events, and stress ostensibly extraneous details. Indeed, it is this fragmented and multifaceted style that makes the narrative so compelling but at the same time so challenging. Hence the necessity of geographical and historical context.

We quickly find out that we are in the district of Kynouria, one of three in the province of Arcadia, which makes up the core of the Peloponnese in Greece. This large peninsula, at the southern end of the Balkans, carries a powerful historical charge, associated with the famous war between Greek city-states that took place between 431 and 404 B.C.E. and was immortalized by Thucydides as the Peloponnesian War. More recently, in the 1820s, the modern Greek state grew out of an uprising that took place primarily in that region. The events described in Orthokostá take place at yet another critical historical moment, the 1940s.

Читать дальше →