THEODOROS GRIGORIADIS
Nostalgia for the loss
ed.. Pataki, page 288

In the preface to the book, Theodoros Grigoriadis writes that much of the prose came about as a result of the quarantine. However, none of them are mentioned in the two-year adventure, with the exception of the last one, which is really excellent. The author speaks of insomnia as a symptom of confinement. To combat this, he resorted to music in its idiosyncratic and popular form, non-musical white noise and, in a subgenre, brown noise. It is a low, continuous hum-like sound, subtle but intense in the ears, a sound that “can produce maximum volume at much lower frequencies”. Grigoriadis writes: “The first time I tried Brown Noise, it kind of scared me, it hummed thinly, without breaking out, exciting.”

I got the impression that the description of the soothing chords echoed perfectly with the composition of Grigoriadis. A soothing sound, low, lingering, surrounded by an echo of suppressed sadness, asking to sleep. In thirty-one stories, the letter returns to the same landscapes, reveals itself in the same addresses, seeks the company of unknown figures. As he waited to be lulled by “thor-fish Brown”, the author discerned “a muffled voice, filtered by time and its distant spectral range.” The inaudible, unspoken voice conveyed “messages and unimaginable sound signals”. He may not break free, he may triumph in self-restraint and self-censorship, he may hate dramatization, but Grigoriadis’s letter is sluggishly imposed, his message creeps. More than words, hints at the silence that creates its acoustics. The native North appears haunted by deep memories, its atmospheric pressure on the soul wets the pages, its vector cuts into the inner essence again and again. But the figures that stand out in the stories for their “strangeness” rest on the secret niches of self-image. Each heterochronized, fictionalized encounter feels like a self-healing.

Otherworldly faces circulate in prose, touching thanks to their kind, vague sketch. The Byzantine Patroclus who was dying quickly, Julia who lived in a cafe, the bibliophile stationmaster, the man who mourned the old cinemas, who cooled himself with the contes, the father who invented the language to reacquaint himself with his unrecognizable son, the murderer who lived on the border of two prefectures, the life in the straits of the New World, the man who kept the folklore collection, “a collection that itself longed for loss.” From Pangeo, “following the path of a buried stream,” Grigoriadis retrieves the materials of his literature. The stream was silted up, but the roots of the plane trees still drank from the buried water, penetrating deeply “into the eternal soils.” From an inexhaustible, abyssal source flows “imaginary self”. Shaking in the soil, the roots evoke eerie images from the underworld.

The sculptor who turned washed logs into works of art believed that the materials of nature, even “rotten and discarded”, retain their secret life. Grigoriadis also follows this technique. He searches for the words of his literature in the natural landscape, in the nature of others, and in his own most intact geographical as well as mental connections. The attempt of writing to avoid the inexpressible, the dearest, makes it sound like “Brownian noise”, low-frequency noise.