BASILICS OF HELIOPOULOU
Innocent
ed.. Polis, page 367

The artist performs acrobatics on a rope, his every step is a gamble, he rests his right foot on the thread, stretches out his arms, checks his weight, swings many meters above the ground without insurance, then he advances, then he falls. ; This is how novelists write their texts. They create from scratch the rope that the stories they create rely on; they are guided by instinct, a mental antenna that says move here, now press there; one wrong turn, one mistake, and everything falls apart. The director Vassiliki Iliopoulou appeared in prose fifty years later and presented, among other things, a wonderful collection of short stories “The Hare’s Heart” (2009) and an unforgettable novel “The Blacksmith” (2010). Her new work, The Innocent, opens with a shocking scene: Eve sees on TV a bear bound by a wild tribe, walking defeated towards the forest to certain death. In the same way, many years ago, the heroine saw her little mentally retarded sister, somewhat lost among other children, who for the first and last time agreed to take her with them. As an adult, Eva returns to the island, demanding to know what really happened to little missing Irene. Iliopoulou is a master. As in “The Heart of a Hare”, with full expressive clarity and perfectly calibrated rhythm, he builds an environment with people and objects, whose outlines are clear. As in The Smith, it uniquely manages to create a slow-moving provincial climate where everything is constantly moving, while at the same time remaining in expectation, obscurity and uncertainty. And, as in previous works, her heroine looks at the world with clear eyes and genuine surprise at the hidden thoughts behind the silent figures or the ambiguous words of other people. All of the Iliopoulou characters seem to be dreamwalking with them and Eve, except that her own obsession is to find out what the truth was. Eve will face broken relationships, personal interests, hidden secrets and guilty silence in her homeland. That is why the suspense is at its peak, as together with the heroine we are looking for those responsible for a dramatic event that happened many years ago. We’re among villagers speaking local idioms, an overbearing mayor, a dutiful son, a whimsical vindictive daughter, a slave dwarf, politicians visiting a developing island, and a psychic (another nice find) who advises Eve from afar. . However, when the narrative begins to move towards its solution, it seems that the author has lost his pace. Because nothing, I think, prepared us for that turn of the case – neither the culprit, nor his motives, but also the final position of Eve. I always admire prose writers who jump on the rope of life from which they must choose the elements that will become the basis of their story. There is a murder in Iliopoulou’s novel, only in her own work, the discovery of the perpetrator is not the result, as in many detective novels, of the invention of a clever solution (which, for detective writers, is usually a safety net at their disposal). In Iliopoulou’s work, the balance depends on something much more complex: the solution must flow from and be in keeping with the character and deeper psychological make-up of all her fictional characters. However, Vasiliki Iliopoulou seems to have lost her guiding antenna in the end.