Edmund Keeley made me dream of Greece. I grew up with him reading Cavafy's poems to me at the dinner table in Princeton, New Jersey. First in Greek, then English. He was my grandfather’s closest friend and in my childhood he turned up regularly – amused, attentive, exacting about words and the world. I did not understand then, aged 9 or 10, that I was being inducted into a whole way of seeing: Greece as modern, complicated, ironic, tender, a place where the past is never past but also never quite allowed to bully the present. In his wonderful novel Night School in Athens, Keeley writes with the same combination of intimacy and rigour. Athens comes to you by night, through friendships, arguments, translations, small encounters, the drift of conversation that ends up somewhere unexpectedly serious. It is a book about learning how to look, and about the moral weight of language when you move between worlds. For me it is also a book about permission: you can belong to Greece through attention, through reading, through love, even if you arrive by the side door.
Then came the Durrells. Gerald first, then, more forcefully, Lawrence. Prospero’s Cell helped me fall in love with Corfu and I have pressed it into the hands of almost everyone I know who has caught the island’s spell. Durrell is extravagant, sometimes absurdly so, but he understood something elemental about Corfu: the way the place rearranges your sense of scale, so that history feels both immense and casually present, as if Bacchus and Odysseus might wander into the frame at any moment. I read it now as less a guide to an island than a record of being bewitched by one. It is full of heat and colour and appetite – the whole book seems written with salt on the skin. It also captures, better than most, the Ionian knack for making seriousness feel like bad manners. You can be profound, but you had better do it with a shrug.
Ersi Sotiropoulos’ What’s Left of the Night takes us to a very different Greece, and to Cavafy at a very particular moment – before the glacial poise, before the voice settles into that unmistakable register. Three days in Paris in June 1897, and everything is in play: his sexuality, his ambition, his fear of making a life that looks too narrow, Greece’s bruised pride after defeat, Europe bristling with tension. The novel is steeped in the bodily experience of becoming yourself. Sotiropoulos writes beautifully about uncertainty, about what it is to grow into greatness, but what must come before, too. If Keeley gave me Cavafy as a voice at the table, she gives him back as a young man trying to earn that voice.
Christos Ikonomou’s Good Will Come from the Sea is one of the great contemporary short story collections. These stories belong to the years of financial collapse post-2008, but they aren’t catastrophic; more they are about how and why Greece fell so hard, so fast. They stay close to the human scale: kitchens, stairwells, buses, work that vanishes, pride that won’t. Someone once described it to me as a kind of Decameron for the crisis, and that feels right – a community talking itself through the worst, telling stories because stories are what you have when institutions fail. What stays with me is Ikonomou’s steadiness. There is anger, but also humour and a stubborn ethics of solidarity. The sea is always nearby, not as romance, more as a reminder that there are older rhythms beyond any cycle of boom and bust.
And then, most recently, Giannis Paschos. Chronicles of a Dyslexic Author is a book I have only just read, and it landed with a bang. Paschos is an ichthyologist as well as a writer, and he treats words like living creatures – darting, evasive, hard to net. The memoir is funny and sharp, but it is also radical in its argument about language. Dyslexia becomes a different relationship with the written world: harder, certainly, but also more alert, more inventive, more alive to what sits behind a sentence. He writes about education with the fury of someone who has seen how systems can knock children into compliance, then he turns around and shows you the escape route: imagination, attention, the pleasure of making meaning where the page refuses to cooperate. I loved this book because it insists that words are not just labels for reality. They change reality. They change how you see. They change what you dare to become.
