GOOD LUCK
House on the Rocks – Legacy / Just One Story
ed. Metaihmio, 2022, p. 458

We are watching the gradual maturation of the heroine and her liberation from the ghosts of an era marked by endless eradication.

Anfimi Velissari is the protagonist of the extensive novel Kali Doxiadis (a promised trilogy, the first two volumes of which are already out – “House on the Rocks” and “Legacy”). A successful journalist in the English-speaking world, Antimi returns, already mature, to her homeland of Corfu to manage her legacy and perhaps reconstruct a difficult family past. Beginning in the summer of 1949, with the end of the Civil War, and the springboard to the dreamy and rebellious fifteen-year-old Antima’s “most important encounter in life” with a stranger hidden in her “cave”, her personal isolation, the narrative meanders between cosmopolitan wanderings, political adventures and personal passions. over a century. Constantly violating the chronological order of the narrative, questioning the reliability of the memories, the narrator insists on connecting the disparate threads of individual incidents and rethinking them in the light of later knowledge. From time to time he stumbles upon a riddle, a hidden truth, a well-kept secret. Every now and then he is interrupted by the eternal question: how feasible is the concept of reality and its conceivability? How reliable is an autobiography?

A coming-of-age novel, the first book in the trilogy is about reconciliation with people and a place that transforms from memory into something tangible and experienced, the second follows Anima’s gradual maturation and her release from ghosts in an era marked by endless migrations and losses. In both cases, politics and history function as connecting, unifying or separating factors. In both cases, nature frames the action as an orgiastic set design, giving the writing a deep sensuality. In both cases, familial and especially fraternal relationships fire up the narrative with their hidden intensity. However, if in “House on the Rocks” the exciting fifteen-year-old protagonist remains a meteorite haunted by the riddle of a stranger in a cave, then in “Legacy” the pieces of the puzzle finally find their place. In the family home in Corfu, an integral part of the mental life of its successive residents, Antima, twenty-seven years after that fateful meeting and subsequent emigration, will finally establish a true connection: the house, “architectural space”, in her father’s words, the fossil of duration, the ark memory becomes a map for navigating the lives of others and a mirror of oneself.

Depersonalized at the beginning, when Antime first visits and wanders through the dark, empty rooms with his lighter in search of long-extinct traces, the house becomes familiar and welcoming again when a few days later, on a stormy night, the narrator finds himself there again, and he finds ready-made bundles of olive roots, artfully arranged, waiting for the flames to light the kitchen machine to heat the room. As if someone – an old, beloved housekeeper – prepared a reception for her. The house regains its dynamics, its intimacy is restored. Now the past, present and future, sometimes contradicting each other, and sometimes mutually stimulating, restart the mechanism of the house and people, those who once lived in it and those who will live, melt in its warmth. It is no coincidence that the unexpected guest of this difficult night, the future resident of the house, will give birth right there, in this room.

Reading the descriptions of a Corfu house, one hears “the hooves of a dream,” as Pierre Jean Jouve would say when reading about his roof. Looking at the stories of his people, another verse from Zub comes to mind: “My cell is full of darkness / the walls are painted with the white of my secret.” If Anthima Velissaris’ legacy is to scrape off the whiteness of these secrets and reveal them as indelible evidence of her identity, to rediscover “a form of affection / those who have so strangely dissolved into our lives / those who have remained shadows of the waves “, a legacy left by its author, is darkness in front of a complex, fascinating, painful, and sometimes shameful human fate.