YANNIS MAKRYDAKIS
sophia ghosts
ed. Home page 264

The fate of Zacharias Melitakis was decided at the age of fifteen. After a family council, his father decided to anoint him as a writer. He was convinced of his son’s writing talent and, in order to encourage his inclination, he organized literary evenings in the summer of 2003 at their summer home in Terme, an island resort village. The teenage Zacharias then bemoaned his unrequited love for Sophia and, “under the control of his inner hot juices of despair”, found in the letter a consolation, but also a means to restore his self-esteem. “Gifts of Sophia” was his last youthful emotion, imbued with a metaphysical fog, since he was baptized on the same day as Sophia, immediately after her, in the waters of the same pool, “in the fluids of her own baptism.” “. “I have bathed in Sophia’s concoction since childhood.” Ten years after the summer “literary estrus”, when he succeeded as little Homer in the summer community, Zacharias, now a graduate of the Faculty of Agriculture, returns to Terme, where he discovers his true vocation – nature. The natural landscape worries him. He goes crazy with the aroma of herbs, carob, oregano, thyme, thyme and maratha, the murmur of a stream, flowering heather; “I felt that the whole world that I knew up to this point in my life was changing inside me is mine “(author’s edition). But sadness remained with him. “I too quickly fell into the melancholy of my loneliness. […]”.

The bucolic bliss was shattered when his father dragged him from his pastoral pasture to the literary center of Athens, presenting him as an excellent debutant author who had a book published in his own name. Caught in the trap of his father’s lies, Zechariah experiences an incredible literary triumph. The bad thing is that he has no desire to write in order to justify the literary expectations of his father (“through me, of course”), writing a second book so fateful for a promising debutante. He preferred to reap the fruits, not the laurels.

From the very beginning of the novel, Yiannis Makridakis makes the hero lament his tragic situation, hiding the reasons for his misfortune. The surprise reaches its peak due to the agronomist’s writing difficulties. However, since, besides melodrama, another constant of Makridakis’s prose is the defense of an ecological utopia, the hero, “an exiled peasant in an urban environment”, being “in a state of psychological landing”, finds himself at the center of shock. Athens paroxysmal worship of nature. Walking along the perimeter of Vasilisa Sophia, he indulges in gentle hugs and intimate confessions with olives, gasias, jasmine, medlar, orange trees, as well as with an almond tree, “with which we had very special and tender moments.”

In Makridakis’ books, the dramatic becomes hilariously tragic in his absence. Here, the bleakness of psychodrama is held together by the outrageous outcome caused by the coronavirus. However, the most serious problem is undoubtedly sloppy speech. Multiple repetition of words within one page, inappropriate verbal expressions (abuse of the verbs “come” and “exist”), gibberish, stupid metaphors, blatant inconsistencies. The peasant, perhaps, plunged into the waters of Sophia, but remained literary illiterate. Perhaps it would be interesting if Makridakis switched his writing from drama to irony, bringing out and emphasizing the comedic tone of his works himself. In this way, any wrongdoing will be compensated by what will appear to be intentional.