YANNIS KARKANEVATOS
Father didn’t talk about them
ed. Home page 152

At the beginning of the novel, the narrator, as if in a dream, receives a suitcase unfamiliar to him – a cargo that requires decoding. He had two more allegorical visions as he searched through the nebulae of time for his father. The man tears the pages of the book he is reading. At the end of the reading, only the cover remains, the rest of the story. In another diorama, a man writes continuously at night, and at dawn he throws his nightly writings into the trash can. The narrator thinks that the night writer and voracious reader echoes their father’s deep self. “Every word, read or written, must be destroyed. Memory remains, like a storekeeper in training. With wrong directories and incomplete lists.”

Giannis Karkanevatos (b. 1966) bases his first book on ancestral history. Putting his father and uncle in front of a video camera, he listens to their story about the years of occupation and the Civil War. Video recordings, reproduced in a carefully selected and artificially unprocessed spoken word, are fragmentarily interspersed in the main narrative, where the author’s reflections on his own growing up unfold with slight melancholy. Another vision comes to the aid of the incomplete memory of the son. He sees his father rooted in a ghostly place, his thick beard overgrown with roots. It was a tree. This transformation involved painful trauma. He had to hide and keep silent to protect his older brother, who had gone to the mountains. From early childhood, he shouldered the security of his “labeled” partisan family. The author’s interview with his father and uncle is a gesture of desperation that does not betray his awareness that the survivors’ trauma remains uncommunicated. Standing in front of him, they showed both in words and in silence the insurmountable abyss between them. “We messed up within our limits.” Accessible. Their salvific voice, the soundtrack to their own history, was a crumbling mound in oblivion. The Bacchic cymbals that had once enchanted my father vanished into a transcendent echo. Nowhere else will there be a holiday. The author struggles with the loss by staging a stretched shot, as his father has long since moved from the hospital to the cemetery. The interview, the memory of his living voice, was like the cover that will remain in the hands of the reader tearing the pages. Reminder of lost words and stories.

If we exclude the countless references to rebels, robbers, persecutions and exiles, now exhausted in the literature, the book of Karkanevatos becomes interesting when it focuses on the inner wanderings of the narrator. Moments of great emotion shine through in these underground, underground passages. I highlight the visit of a son and a sick father to an ancestral village, a tobacco village lost in the prefecture of Serres. A ravaged place, littered with remnants and ruins. Father and son join in the “dance of the unseen” as they move through the empty spaces, tracing the former plane by memory, pointing to non-existent footprints. Father, shadow in empty space. Karkanevatos worked on a fictional composition with an obvious method, while at the same time he controlled the intensity of the emotions with careful overtones. The literary quality of the book is provided by fleeting, hallucinatory moments, where sadness is revealed in the montage of memories and dreams.