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  • The Political Is the Personal
  • Steven Wingate (bio)
The Green Shore by Natalie Bakopoulos, Simon & Schuster, http://www.simonandschuster.com, 368 368 pp., $25.00

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When the subject of Greece enters American minds today, it’s usually in reference to that nation’s current financial instability: the largest debt default in the history of humankind, which has imperiled the entire European economy and given jitters to the rest of the world. But in the late 1960s and early 1970s, when many in Western culture were tuning in, turning on, and dropping out, Greece faced a more dangerous political instability during a seven-year military takeover—one of the most recent dictatorships the West has seen.

The Green Shore, a finely wrought first novel by Natalie Bakopoulos, unfolds in this environment—one that resembles, in its stark contrast between the left and the right, a dystopian vision of America’s future that may come to life before our eyes as both sides take increasingly oppositional stances. That “the personal is the political” has been a truism for over a generation, but Bakopoulos’s work suggests that the obverse is equally true. In an environment dominated by political division and fear, the goings-on of those in power ripple down into personal relationships within families and between lovers. The question, “Whose side are you on?” can dent and diminish even the strongest bonds.

So too in this novel’s world can the question, “How will you fight the battle?” A generation before The Green Shore is set, Greece had fought a civil war (1946–1949) between left and right. Those who took sides in that war, now past their prime as political agitators, approach resistance to the junta differently than their young counterparts and may not see eye-to-eye tactically as much as they do in principle. This political environment will be familiar to American audiences because of our familiarity with two leftist demographic groups that have similar goals but don’t quite overlap: the baby boomers who gave us free love and peace protests at the cusp of the 1970s, and the Occupy movement of today. Now is a good time for this book to come out, and I hope that readers will encounter it in a trans-generational political context.

At the center of The Green Shore stands one Athens family and its satellites. Eleni, a widow and a doctor, has three children: early twenty-something Sophie, brash and outspokenly against the junta; son Taki, a blustery late teenager about to escape the coming trouble by leaving for college in America; and the post-adolescent Anna, who candidly observes the world she is not quite old enough to participate in. Their uncle Mihalis is a noted poet who has done time—and endured torture—for being on the wrong side in the civil war; both of his nieces look to him as a mentor at different points of the novel, which spans six years and ends before the dictatorship’s eventual fall in 1974. Orbiting this world are Dimitri, Eleni’s right-of-center lover and fellow doctor; Irini, married unhappily to the hot/cold Mihalis; the poet’s friend Vangelis, a cab driver and fellow survivor of torture; and two cousins outside the family named Nick and Loukas, both of whom fall in love with Sophie.

Bakopoulos manages this web with a somewhat formal and distant third-person narrator, supplemented by selective glimpses into her characters’ minds; it’s a big story, and she keeps it comparatively lean by carefully picking her spots to show the world through their eyes. This lends itself to small, subtle, and telling observations throughout: the aging Mihalis feeling his bicep to test his might after the coup and telling himself that he is still young, still strong; Anna observing that Mihalis and Sophie “dived headfirst into trouble and laughed when they emerged”; Taki’s face wearing “an expression of distaste, as if the family were something sour or bitter that he had to hold in his mouth indefinitely before swallowing.” She also makes use of sweeping panorama at times—the best of...

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