Deep Blue, Almost Black (review)

Thanks to an idiosyncratic, always intriguing, and consistently challenging literary discourse, Thanassis Valtinos has established himself as the most successful and innovative contemporary Greek storyteller of his people's micro-historical narratives. With Assimakopoulos's and Deligiorgis's masterly translation of Deep Blue, Almost Black, English-speakers now have access to some of the brightest pieces of his literary work.

Deep Blue, Almost Black contains the homonymous novella «, » (1985) and the twelve short stories of the collection (1992). In his short stories, Valtinos traces the complex ramifications of major historical, political, and social events in twentieth-century Greece as inscribed in the speech and deeds of simple, unknown, and marginal characters. Most of these stories have been composed as small individual fragments of grander public narratives in a way reminiscent of Valtinos's literary experimentations in (1963) (1989) and, most recently, (1994).

The multilayered embeddedness of Valtinos's short stories in a broader sociohistorical framework is already indicated by their titles, which more often than not point to the metonymic fragmentariness of each individual small narrative: "August '48," "The River Kaystros," "The Plaster Cast," "Peppers in a Flowerpot," "Panayotis," "Autumn Storm," "Peter and Pat," "You Will Find My Bones Under Rain." The construction of the stories in as metonymic transcriptions of major sociohistorical changes in twentieth-century Greece—the Asia Minor catastrophe, the German occupation during the second world war, the civil war, the military dictatorship, emigration— bespeaks a Cavafian view of history in which the marginal and the private are foregrounded at the expense of the grandiose and the public. Valtinos refuses to subscribe to the premises of grand historical discourses or epic literary narratives. In his short stories, it is personal histories that articulate the tensions of the historical past and the disrupted present. Most narratives in celebrate the power of popular history to protect peripheral, local, and personal experiences of major historical, political, or social events from the amnesia of established modes of historiography.

"August '48" is a brief chronicle of a dramatic minor incident during the Greek civil war. The romantic expectations established by the almost Cavafian title are undermined by the tragic atmosphere of the narrated event. "Peppers in a Flowerpot" uses a similar, albeit more explicit, ironic trick: despite the promising title, the story is set neither in an idyllic garden nor in the courtyard of a picturesque Greek house, but in the interrogation chamber of a commandant at the service of the military dictatorship, who keeps a pot of flowers in his office. The title of "The Plaster Cast," first published as one of the "Eighteen Texts" in 1970, functions also as a subversive metonymy of the metaphorical medical discourse often employed by the Greek military dictators. The whole story is narrated as an ironic allegorical martyría of an alleged patient who was forced to undergo the unorthodox "orthopaedics" practiced by some anonymous "doctors" whom the informed reader can easily identify with the dictators.

"Panayotis" is a brief note on the life of an obscure, marginal character, a beggar whose fate has been traumatically marked by his sufferings in the Asia Minor war. This short story, a secular synaxári or Life of the almost saintly Panayotis, attests to Valtinos's deep interest in different forms of popular narrative, most successfully exemplified in his masterly «» (1964). On the other hand, the terseness of the framing introductory and concluding paragraphs in "Panayotis," which respectively describe the first years and the inglorious end of Panayotis's life, invest the whole narrative with the atmosphere of an obituary or rather of an anti-obituary: "He was born in Kynouria, in the village of Karatoula. He was drafted in 1919. In the fall of 1920, after a year's delay, he was called up for duty in the army" (33). "He died that same year, in the month of August. He had taken the animals out to graze, felt thirsty, and bent down to drink from some...