MARIA FAKINOU
Bogart scale
ed. antipodes, P. 112

The novel Interrogation (2008, 2020) by Ilias Maglinis captures the bloody confrontation between father and daughter. The father remembers the torment of his body in the hellholes of EKA, and the weak daughter, reacting to the silence of this tormented body, turns her body into a field of trenches, making her skin scream. Maria Fakinou’s novel is reminiscent of Maglini’s book, but in reverse. And here we see the implicit conflict of the father with the daughter, but now the father has become the tormentor of the ESA, and when his daughter finds out, she breaks off their relationship forever. The father perceives his daughter’s overweight body as a “reproach”, as if ridiculing his athletic, strong ligament. If he hated his daughter’s bulimic body, then she hated the crimes committed by his own body.

Central to the novel is the voice of an all-seeing narrator who, through constant recollection, causes the father to become the recipient of both the horror he committed and the wrath (his daughter) he received. The narrator’s inexorable memory counters the father’s selective amnesia. The story takes place primarily in the second person, as the narrator turns to the father as the daughter’s protector, seeking to bring him to justice. Daughter is not heard on the pages. The omniscient narrator speaks on her behalf, but is in no hurry to torment the accused with painful memories. At first, he refers to the past fragmentarily, with omitted and fragmentary sentences, interspersing insignificant and painless moments, trying, however, to return the missing daughter to his speech, the absence of which portends the condemnation of the father.

Every night, at 3.45 am, the father, exiled to Athens, after his exploits were known in the village, met with his nightmares. It was the time when the garbage truck was passing by. A photo of an ESA armband was found in a junkyard in the attic. Daughter’s fat fingers were collected from the family dump, “from the dark place of useless things”, an unscrupulous souvenir.

Fachino tries to dramatize the split between father and daughter by drowning out the drama between them. Little is said about his dirty past and his influence on his daughter. Often what is not said, what is doomed to silence, acquires an intolerable meaning. The same is true now. What separates father and daughter is so bleak that it takes the mediation of a third party to start any kind of negotiations. Except that the author’s apparent intent to write in a dramatic way rather than the drama itself leads the narrative into references to real-life tragedies, such as Sorin Mattei’s invasion of an apartment on Niovis Street one night in 1998, the corpse washed ashore on the beach by three-year-old Aylan, and the deadly fire in Mati, events that do not fit convincingly into fiction. In particular, the momentary impulse of the daughter to go to the aid of the shipwrecked in the Aegean Sea as an atonement for the iniquities of her father is too melodramatic.

Fakino’s letter erases the cyclic movements around the impregnable core. Half-sentences and a series of everyday moments, held back by broken syntax, imply that what needs to be said will remain intact. And that’s what’s left of the story. The bitterness of an unanswered word.