Middlesex - Jeffrey Eugenides (Μίντλσεξ - Τζέφρι Ευγενίδης)

Middlesex had been lying on my bookshelf for a while before I plucked up the courage to pick it up and read it. I'd bought it at a second-hand bookshop, attracted of course by the author's Greek surname, and the short blurb on the back of the book about the story: "Middlesex tells the breathtaking story of Calliope Stephanides, and three generations of the Greek-American Stephanides family, who travel from a tiny village overlooking Mount Olympus in Asia Minor to Prohibition-era Detroit..."

I googled the book for more information, but the reviews I read did not emphasise any part of the immigrant storyline that it is based on. They mainly concentrated on the sexual orientation of the main character:

"I was born twice: first, as a baby girl, on a remarkably smog-less Detroit day of January 1960; and then again, as a teenage boy, in an emergency room near Petoskey, Michigan, in August of 1974. . . My birth certificate lists my name as Calliope Helen Stephanides. My most recent driver's license...records my first name simply as Cal."

So begins the breath-taking story of Calliope Stephanides and three generations of the Greek-American Stephanides family who travel from a tiny village overlooking Mount Olympus in Asia Minor to Prohibition-era Detroit, witnessing its glory days as the Motor City, and the race riots of 1967, before they move out to the tree-lined streets of suburban Grosse Pointe, Michigan. To understand why Calliope is not like other girls, she has to uncover a guilty family secret and the astonishing genetic history that turns Callie into Cal, one of the most audacious and wondrous narrators in contemporary fiction. Lyrical and thrilling, Middlesex is an exhilarating reinvention of the American epic.

Take note that the above description (the standard one found on most websites that feature the book) was taken from a gayNZ website. (It's also inlcuded in a Greek gay website.) But the story is not about a homosexual. Gender issues (aka sex) are a money-spinner, in a way that Greek social history is not. Sex has always been a very marketable commodity, and people's lust for the sexually unusual is insatiable. So it is such a shame that this brilliant story, based on the lives of an extended Greek diaspora family in America over the course of more than five decades, does not get the attention it deserves in terms of the value it possesses in the discussion about Greek heritage and Greek identity. Greekness is not as sensational as being intersexual.

Amazon reviewers make this point quite clear: "Too long," one recent reviewer wrote, "the last part was good, but it took forever to get there. I would not recommend this book." Similar to another one: "While reading Middlesex I enjoyed it immensely but until last 130 pages, if I were I put it down I wouldn't pick it up again for weeks at a time. Finally yesterday I got 3/4 of a way through and couldn't put it down - loved the last 130 pages. Loved it." The last 130 pages of this very long book (over 500 pages) contain the most explicit sexual descriptions.

Although the story has a reasonably happy ending, Middlesex is in essence a sad story. Some of the names of the characters, such as Desdemona (the main character's Greek grandmother who was born in a village with a Greek name which is now part of modern-day Turkey), attest to their ill-fated destiny. The doom and gloom of the story is firmly set on the very first page, with all the eerie moments of the main character's life described quite succinctly.

Eugenides' story-telling techniques make compelling reading, so you will not be bored as you plod through the book - unless you find the historical aspects of Greek identity boring, and there is a lot of that! Greek-American Eugenides claims that he had to learn about the history of his Greekness* because only his grandfather was Greek, and his Greekness essentially died with the passing of his grandparents. But he has done such a good job in this way, that by reading Middlesex, other Greeks, especially estranged ones, will learn about their Greek identity in a way that will help them to understand themselves better.

Middlesex is a good example of literature related to melting-pot/migration issues. Of course, the gender issue is far more central and crucial to the story than are the Greek identity and disapora heritage parts, but Eugenides focuses equally on the two themes and he marries them well in the story he tells. The author himself insists that he didn't want to write a story about Greek-Americans; he wanted to write about hermaphrodites. But he needed some kind of base, and his story does end up sounding very much like a Greek-American saga with a twist.

Without flipping through the book again after I'd read it (although I would like to read it once more at least in my life), the parts I like to keep in mind are three:

1. when Desdemona calls out 'sonofabichie' to get the streetcar to stop when it passes by her destination point, and she smiles as she gets out of the car while the other passengers look at her somewhat perplexed. Immigrant stories are full of tragi-comic cross-cultural blunders. I recall a Greek man in New Zealand telling us what he did when he went to a butcher for the first time in his life, where he wanted to buy chicken. Either he didn't know the English word for it, or he couldn't pronounce it well (maybe he was calling it 'kitchen'), so he flapped his hands by his side, and the butcher eventually understood.
2. when Desdemona describes how she felt when she got a job, where she worked with black people: "then they make me go to work for those mavros, oh my God!" Racism is a touchy subject, and I think that Eugenides was right not to tell us much too much about how the Greek family approached the issue of black America, even though they were living in the thick of it, in 1960's Detroit and the race riots. But we get a good idea of what was going on in this sphere at two points in the story: when little Callie was told by her father Milton (Desdemona's son, baptised Miltiades, which is Americanised to Milton) not to approach strangers (she made friends with a black man on the street), and when Milton asks a rhetorical question to the same black man who was dodging sniper fire while Milton had barricaded himself in his restaurant trying to protect it during the riots: "What's the matter with you people?" (Read the book to find out the haunting answer that the black man gave.)
3. when Milton decides that "We have to do whatever's in our national interest," after his Greek-heritage friend (as most people the family associates with are) declared that Americans betrayed the Greeks, to which Milton replied "To hell with the Greeks then." This signals a defining moment of a sudden change of identity, similar to the transformation of the teenage girl Callie to the teenage boy Cal. It also shows an acceptance of who one really is: Greek or American, which again pairs well with the gender-change theme, girl or boy. You can't always choose to be both.

Readers of the same novel will not all get the same thing out of reading it. For me, Middlesex was a very well-written well-narrated story that explores many issues related to cultural identity. For this reason, I recommend that all people of Greek heritage should read this book, because it will tell them a lot about themselves. Although Middlesex deals with very heavy topics, Eugenides liberally sprinkles a lot of humour throughout his story. To quote him from a 2003 interview:

"Well, Greek-Americans are always thinking back to their so-called glorious past, and it’s… it’s a good place for comedy – the distance between Sappho and Souvlaki, basically – and I try to use that in this book."

Bonus information.
The following links:
http://www.theguardian.com/books/2011/dec/02/jeffrey-eugenides-middlesex-book-club
http://www.theguardian.com/books/2011/nov/25/book-club-middlesex-jeffrey-eugenides
http://www.theguardian.com/books/2011/nov/18/book-club-middlesex-jeffrey-eugenides
http://www.theguardian.com/books/2011/nov/11/jeffrey-eugenides-middlesex-book-club
are written by John Mullan, a Professor of English at University College London, who specialises in 18th century fiction, and writes a weekly column on contemporary fiction for The Guardian. There is very little mention of cultural identity issues in this series of reviews. Mullan also interviews Greek-Australian writer Christos Tsiolkas who wrote the shockingly provocative The Slap, an excellent example of melting pot immigrant literature:
http://www.theguardian.com/books/audio/2014/jan/24/christos-tsiolkas-the-slap-podcast
Again, he does not mention the immigrant aspect of the story, even though a good number of the people in the audience (the link leads you to a podcast) were of Greek heritage and the Greek diaspora communities are discussed in their questions. (To hurry the interview along at the end, Mullan wraps it up by telling the audience that he wants enough time to have a drink with Tsiolkas at a pub.)

I don't know if I am correct to say this, and maybe I am being slightly (or perhaps overly) provocative to mention this, but it seems to me that the academic world does not understand the Greek mind at all, it does not understand the Greek diaspora (a Greek word often attributed to the Jews), and it does not pay enough attention to the concept of Greek identity...

... which is the reason why the global attention to the Greek financial crisis is so misdirected, and why the world cannot help the Greeks of Greece in the right way. The solution to the Greek crisis - which was an identity crisis in the disguise of an economic crisis - will come from the Greeks themselves, not the IMF or the ECB, perhaps with the help of the EU, which is an inseparable part of Greece, as Greece is an inseperable part of Europe.

* In this link, you will also find another link to some 'Greek' recipes that the Oprah Winfrey bookclub suggests, like Lemon and Lavender Mousse with Blueberry Soup. Greek food was not so 'in' in 2007 when these links went up. Only 7 years have passed, but the globally connected world that we live in is better acquainted with Greek food to detect mislabeling.    

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New York a la Cart by Alexandra Penfold and Shiobhan Wallace

... so, to cut a long story short, my friends told me that anything they eat back home is GMO, and it's actually really hard to find non-GMO food where they live, and even when they do find it, it costs a lot of money. (They recall eating a nice peach once, I was told, for US$2. A piece. They shared it.) So it's a misnomer to talk about the 'best' food back there, because most food is kind of not-so-good, in the sense that we talk about good food here in Crete (they said to me), where you eat a tomato that you can actually taste, or squeeze a lemon that you can smell, or cut open a watermelon that is as red as wine and not as pink as chewing gum, and the herbs used to flavour your meat come from the same locality where the meat was raised. (They haven't taken a bath since they've been here, so as not to lose the aromas of wild thyme, oregano and sea salt from their body.)

New York street food in my kitchen.

Good food over there is not the same as good food over here, they insisted, while their children were asking why there weren't any Doritos on the table, or why there was no cilantro available in the stores, and why they couldn't get a super duper triple-size glass of soda instead of all those little bottles that the waitress was bringing them every fifteen minutes. (Size matters over there.)

Confined work spaces are the norm in a street food cart - my kitchen does not feel much different at times.

But there is good food there too, they insisted, and the people who sell it on the street from their carts compete to make it the best. These same people who live quite far removed from the tomatoes that taste like tomatoes and the lemons that smell like lemons share the same passion for preparing good food as those who live near the tasty tomatoes and aromatic lemons, and that's why street food is revered there, not just for its superlative taste, but for the passionate souls who prepare it for the other hungry souls in the city.

And just like any good food makers, those people on the streets of New York all have a story to tell. My friends know how much I love a good food story, so they bought me one that combines travel with food in their own home town: New York a la Cart by Alexandra Penfold and Shiobhan Wallace. Food stories in new York are not difficult to find since most food cart vendors there have immigrant origins, as they "have found the promise of a better life in street vending, bringing a bit fo the old country to the New World... A city of old and new immigrants, New York offers unparalleled dining diversity... behind every cart and every truck were the hoped and dreams of a fellow New Yorker by birth of by choice."

The stories of the cart vendors reminded me of my own parents' dreams of a better life as immigrants to New Zealand - they too were involved in the food industry: they were part of a tradition that many immigrants anywhere still follow to this day: "using food vending as a means to make a living and a stepping stone to success." Greek immigrants of the past were some of the champs in this trade, and even New York knows this well: "New York and its palate saw another rapid change when the 1965 - the same period my parents emigrated - Immigration Act opened borders.. Greeks opened carts selling guros and souvlaki, grilled chicken and lamb pita sandwiches; with time, they came to own the majority of the working food carts. Their success allowed them to employ other immigrants to actually man the carts." This illustrates a very significant element of the Greek psyche - Greeks generally want to be their own boss. This partly explains why Greece has always had a disproportionately high rate of self-employment, and this will probably continue, despite the economic problems of the country.

If Crete doesn't stock it, then I have to make it - wonton wrappers.

I would love to be a street food vendor because it would bring my food directly in close contact to the people who would be eating it. But street vending is associated with a great many problems which are similar all over the world: competition for the best spot, over-regulation by the state, vendor crackdowns, parking problems, legal trappings, and the biggest problem of all: harassment of all kinds, especially old timers and thugs. Being a female street food vendor can't be easy either, as noted by one of the NY ice-cream vendors. If I could open a food cart in Hania, I would also face another problem: selling unusual food to not-so-enticed eaters. I wouldn't be selling Greek food: I'd be selling things I want to see being sold, like Asian spring rolls. Street food here is not an art form: apart from koulouri, chestnut and corn stands, we don't have much more. Recently I noticed a drinks seller - that's a direct effect of the economic crisis.

Rolling up the Taiwanese dumplings - they looked more like spring rolls to me: this is explained by the fact that the person making them in the NT cart also makes Japanese dumplings which are similar - and that is all explained by the influence of Japanese culture in Taiwan.

New York a la Cart is a must-read for those who love to hear the stories behind the food. It also contains so many enticing photos, and the recipes given are quick, easy and cheap to make, otherwise such wouldn't be a sell out on the street, no matter which place they were being sold. We had some pieces of leftover boiled lamb meat from a village feast; using some bits and pieces of our own vegetable harvests, I was able to make a really good version of Taiwanese dumplings. I used boiled lamb instead of pork mince, and grated zucchini instead of cabbage (cabbage in Hania in the summer is imported from the mainland - it's still too hot to grow it in Crete which explains why it has disappeared from the street market at the moment).

Food cart workers work in very confined spaces - my kitchen does not feel much bigger most of the time. But I still managed to find some space to roll out some wonton wrappers, as the recipe states. We don't have wonton wrappers ready to buy in Crete - we do have filo pastry squares, but since I never buy them (and I do often think of the expense in doing so), I always roll out my own pastry. The instructions in the recipe provided me with a good tip for future dumpling/spring roll making: don't seal the roll/dumpling too tightly. The given recipe also stated to place some water in the pan after frying the dumplings (well, they looked more like spring rolls to me) to let them steam in it for 5 minutes. But this is very not-Greek (boiling pastry after it has fried), so I just served them pan-fried. They were a complete hit; we have also become big fans of hot sauce with our international cuisine, after so many travel experiences.

It's a great feeling to know that I can copy any recipe from around the world in my own home. 

Thank you very much, Deby. 

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How to be Greek without being Greek

Free, today only, on Kindle.

Get yours now for some light summer reading.

Coffee, beach and work

After a blotchy start, with rain, clouds and high winds, it feels like summer has finally set in.

IGUANA BEACH, Ayious Apostolous, my local beach, located near forested area, which is still free for all to use.

Frappe, beach and a good book to read. Today, I took along my work-related material. As I have mentioned on many occassions on my blog, much of my work is based on reading material that contains interesting information, which I often share with readers. 

Today's reading was very pertinent to my surroundings: PES (payments for environmental services). What is PES? It's basically a way to make money to protect forests and natural environment. What we take for granted is often spoiled by overuse or misuse. What may have been freely accessed in our grandparents' times when there were less than 3 billion people in the world now needs protection in the era of 7 billion people, where these places are used not just for self-sufficiency and survival, but also for recreation and entertainment, accepting visitors not just from the locality, but from all over the world.

A friend asked me if I could concentrate well enough to read a non-fiction book at the noisy busy beach on a Sunday afternoon. You can egotistically switch off at a Greek beach, because everyone who is there is doing their own thing. You may feel hunched up together with strangers vying for space, and there may seem to be a lack of privacy in Greece in general, but eventually, you realise that the personal space you create around you in a public space - be it a cafe, a beach, a taverna - is where you can be yourself, and in this day and age, as long as you are not bothering anyone or breaking rules, no one will object.

If you can multi-task effectively (I guess I am good at this, as reasearch suggests that most women are), you can do your own thing, while making sure that you don't miss out on anything extraordinary. This afternoon, the only thing that casued a great commotion was a bride in a cabrio which was beeping loudly and incessantly until it took her to the church on the little hill where the wedding was taking place. But if you know this Greek tradition, you will only look up momentarily to catch sight of the spectacle, before you get back to your own little world. 

My local and highly popular little beach is still free for all to enjoy - but for how long, I don't know. For now, it sounds luxuriousto have the freedom to combine coffee, beach and work: maybe it is a luxury...

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Vegetarian cookbooks (Συνταγές για χορτοφάγους)

I like vegetarian food and can prepare vegetarian meals much more easily than I can meat meals. And all this, even though I am a carnivore. That's another reason why I don't like the vegetarian label in my blog: I am not actively trying to be a vegetarian.

A colleague recently mentioned her cookbook library to me, telling me about one of her favorites, a collection of vegetarian recipes by Sarah Brown, a former BBC TV presenter. As I'm always looking for new ways to present vegetables to my not always so willing family, I asked to view her copy. Sarah Brown's Vegetarian Cookbook (1984) is one of those books that came out when Westerners were only starting out to embrace vegetarinism as a kind of lifestyle choice, and new ingredients that we now take for granted were only becoming known at the time (eg carob as a substitute for chocolate).

Vegetable cookbooks are different from vegetarian cookbooks - vegetables can, after all, be cooked with meat and fish.

The recipes in this book rely heavily on natural food items, with very few processed ingredients being used. An additional taste dimension is provided by Mediterranean and Asian flavourings, eg oregano and miso. The few photos contained in the book show dishes in earthy colours: everything looks cream, beige, orange, yellow and brown; soups are green if they have watercress added to them or red if they contain beetroot. All the food looks natural with a high level of transparency that most mass-produced, store-bought ready-to-eat vegetarian-labelled food does not have in our times.

Cookbooks of this kind (simple recipes, few photos) are no longer written. The book reminded me of one of my own favorite cookbooks, The Amrita Cook Book: Vegetarian Recipes, illustrated by Melanie Walker in a similar way to the famous Moosewood Cookbook. Amrita was the name of the vegetarian restaurant which first presented this style of cooking to highly urbanised people. It was published in Wellington, New Zealand, in the same year as Sarah Brown's, and features similar easy-to-make inspiring recipes based on meatless cooking, at a time when cooking that was labelled vegetarian/vegan (it clearly denotes this distinction) was regarded as an oddity.

The recipes in both books, which are probably now viewed as vintage vegetarian cookbooks, rely heavily on beans and grains for protein, herbs and spices for a savory taste, and honey and molasses for sweetness. They are mainly based on good taste combinations, rather than colour arrangements. In a sense, there is no need for cookbook recipes when you prepare your food in this way, as there is a certain amount of freedom in terms of the final combination on your plate. Apart from the baking sections, the recipes simply provide some ideas that will inspire you to be creative; they are based on easy-to-access ingredients, with use being made of some novel ingredients for the time, which are more commonly available now.

Since there are few or no photographs, it is up to the reader to imagine the final appearance of a recipe, and also what the taste will be like. The instructions for most recipes are sometimes so short and simple that there is no real recipe. They provide inspiration for people to experiment with their own favorite taste combinations. No status is implied in the foods - they are not based on image. This is all a far cry from today's style of cooking, where the reader is enticed into a website by a food porn photography. There is so much to choose from these days that it is difficult to make a final choice. All these points are reiterated by well-known vegetarian writers in more contemporary times:

"So - what do I look for in a top ten vegetarian cookbook? Inspiration, first and foremost: the recipes have to leap off the page and make me want to rush off and cook them. Secondly, the atmosphere of the book: it has to be warm, friendly, accessible. And thirdly, of course, the recipes have got to work." Rose Elliot 

Vegetarian cookbooks like Sarah Brown's and Melanie Walker's are now regarded as old-fashioned, shelved for specific, almost historical uses. In our days, food carries status, it projects an image and it sells a concept. Vegetarianism is not just about healthy eating; it involves ethical choices. A purely vegetarian cookbook sounds like a misnomer these days - it needs to form a part of a book discussing lifestyle choice. The biggest problem with these books is that they lack a cultural base. Even the recipes in books like Sarah Brown's Vegetarian Cookbook and the Amrita Cook Book contain ingredients that are generally not available, not cheap or not commonly used in Greek cuisine, eg miso, soya milk, adzuki/mung beans, horseradish, etc. This isn't to say that they can't be replaced by other more common ingredients, but being a vegetarian means living off a more restricted range of food, so it follows that a vegetarian will seek more variety. But not all ingredients and cooking utensils/techniques are available in all parts of the world, while eating habits differ too. So a vegetarian cookbook can only really be useful in Western countries where the food chain relies on international cuisine and lifestyle choices.

At my workplace, vegetarian meal options are always offered - the pastitsio was made in both a vegetarian version (left) and the classic mince sauce version (right). 

In Greece, a vegetarian cookbook would probably not make the most popular book title list. Our cuisine is moving into global/internaitonal pathways, but it does not yet encompass the ethical nature of eating. We see new products and Western recipes more commonly in use these days, but the idea of fairtrade, organic and vagetarian stull hasn't quite caught on. I don't mind that - I don't believe in image labelling of food (that's something you do for the profit factor). But if you think that many of the most well-known dishes in Greek cuisine are actually vegetarian-based, a book with a title like Vegetarian Greek Cuisine could easily be written. The only problem with that is that Greeks are generally not vegetarian in the first place, making it sound like a contradiction!

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Paper knowledge (Χάρτινες γνώσεις)

I felt pangs of envy as I eyed my London hosts' bookshelves. They were full of books that I couldn't dream of touching, let alone afford: arty, hard-backed, specialist books that we often like to browse through. My friends don't own e-book readers. They still use the less sustainable form of the printed word. Even more eye-opening was the fact that throughout my train journeys in London, I did not encounter a single person using an e-book reader. Those that were not reading their text messages on their cellphones were reading tangible paper, mostly a free newspaper or a real book. In fact, the book looked like a status symbol: the harder the cover, the higher your status. My e-book reader makes me look poor (and indeed, this is why I bought it in the first place - to get cheap access to reading material in the English language).

Over time, I've convinced myself that I don't really need to buy many paper books now that I have an e-book reader; there's always the internet where we can read whatever we want, convert it to a PDF file and read that on our reader too. It's the same stuff that's in the expensive books that I can't really afford to buy. But the touch of a book does not have the same appeal as an e-book reader - real paper has a luxurious feel to it these days.

Among the many titles I found on my friends' bookshelves were also a host of cookery books. I spotted the hard-back copy of Plenty on their shelves, which I'd bought as an e-book for £2.49. "It's really good, isn't it?" they said, and I nodded half-heartedly, although I wondered where they found the time to cook anything from it since they spend very long hours away from home, working and chasing up hobbies, which means very little time to spare for cooking up a fresh Ottolenghi. I also suppose they didn't pick up on the bloopers: "Use Greek black olives of the dry wrinkled variety. Having matured longer on the tree, they are saltier and more robust in flavour." (Black wrinkled olives are saltier because they have had salt added to them to cure them...) The photographs in the book do not jump out of my e-book screen, but the recipes are just as clearly written.

As if their real books were not enough, they had a whole lot of other books lying around the house that were borrowed from the local public library, recent titles containing the latest word so to speak on various topics - and a good number of those books were also food-based. I felt like all my Christmasses had come at once: I had a week to gorge on two science books and four food books! Here are some speed reviews of these titles. The prices are all for the Kindle version of the books (except the first which is only available in paper form).

Home at 7, Dinner at 8. £9.59 Flipping through the book, I noticed a range of enticing meals that relied on a wide range of ingredients. Some of them could be considered exotic, but as the writer explains: "... cooking isn't about getting worried that you are missing a certain ingredient or you can't find what you need in the supermarket. Just go with what you have and take it easy..." But some of the ingredients used need to be have been prepared beforehand or bought in a processed form, eg boiled beetroot and canned beans, neither of which can be used in their natural form in a 'quick' meal. The recipes all stated the preparation time needed to prepare them, and the point of the book was to show how you could cook a meal with a gourmet look very quickly, much in the same way as Jamie Oliver's (in)famous 15- and 30-minute recipes.

My opinion: The time factor in a meal doesn't concern me so much these days, as I find it very easy to prepare a meal in little time. There are many ways of economising on time without scrimping on quality. The appealing photos in this book didn't always remind me of meals that would be enjoyed by the whole family: combinations such as beetroot and broad beans, or tuna with grapefruit and chili are probably a little too avant garde for young eaters. Admittedly, a home-by-7 schedule doesn't often connote a family life... Some recipes stated suspiciously short cooking times for meat dishes, something I've always avoided due to the health issues involved in this kind of cooking style (Jamie Oliver really has a gall to produce such books and then state in an interview that he is getting involved in slow food, and no, he says, he didn't consciously build an empire). In short, the paper book didn't give me any more inspiration to cook better meals than I am already cooking.

The Hairy Dieters. £6.65 This is a spin-off book from a TV series featuring The Hairy Bikers and their comfort food. They have produced a number of books all containing twists on favorite stodgy British recipes (all downed with alcohol of course), from curries to pies to baking. Their latest book - featuring photos of their slimmed-down selves - relies on calorie-counted recipes and tips for how not to over-indulge (including going alcohol-free), topped up by some quirky use of innuendos, like "Pack your lunch box with the ingredients a topless sandwich... That way, your topless sarnie doesn't get a soggie bottom" and 'smart' advice: "If you're hungry between meals, drink lots of water. It has no calories and will help you feel full."

My opinion: This book contains tempting photos of delicious comfort food that bears no resemblance to something you'd eat on a diet, except if you're eating minimal portions. Take the cheese leek and onion pasties for example - the only diet aspect of this recipe is that if you eat only one, you could possibly lose weight. (but you probably wouldn't stop at one alone). The diet advice offered throughout the book is the same kind of tired advice often given in other diet-related literature, so there is nothing new to learn here. Having said all that, the recipes were very family-friendly, the kind of things you can imagine cooking for a young family and everyone enjoying what they were eating and asking for seconds.

Cooking Without Recipes. £5.39 The title grabbed my attention because this is the way I often cook, without specific recipes. The book aims, among other things, to teach you "how to knock something together from the old remnants of your fridge" and to "encourage you to find new ways to shop for, cook and eat the kind of food you love." The book describes in detail the basics involved in setting up your kitchen and a how-to-use section for various kinds of food items (eg individual vegetables). There are no recipes per se, nor are there any photographs. It's probably a good book for the complete amateur who has experienced a life-changing event, and wants to begin cooking for themselves without ever having done it before.

My opinion: The first few pages of the book read a bit like a personal culinary memoir, I almost felt as though I was reading my own blog written by someone else, giving me a deja vu experience. I guess I'm too advanced a creative cook to find this book enthralling. It felt good to read about other like-minded cooks like myself.

What to Eat: Food that's good for your health, pocket and plate. £6.73 Trying to combine health and price in our food is a tricky subject these days. The book starts by dictating to the reader in Pollan-like style how they should eat: "Base your diet on real, unprocessed food; Don't buy food with ingredients you won;t find in a domestic larder; Don't dismiss traditional food knowledge; Practice vegetable-centric eating; Waste nothing - use up every last bit of food you buy; Stick with eat from free-range animals rather than sticking to factory-farmed, but consider reducing the quantity you eat; etc", in other words, the kinds of things I've adopted into my own cooking regime due to my lifestyle rather, ie out of need, rather than due to my belief in morally ethical eating habits. Later chapters discuss the health aspects and ethical considerations of eating various vegetable, meat and dairy products. There are no recipes or photos; some quirky stories surrounding food items are provided to maintain the interest of the reader, who is most likely someone who wants to start eating with a conscience.


My opinion: Books like this one forget the basic reason behind food - we need to eat (cheaply, wherever possible) to live, and in reality, few of us have the luxury or time and money to choose what we eat. Because of where we live and how we live, and the fact that land and cultivation have always been an important part of my husband's life, I take solace in the fact that my food chain is a short one and I can rely on very good quality cheap fresh food all year round, but I also know this is an exception in highly urbanised societies. Heat'n'eats are not popular where I live: we simply don't have the range of ready food at a supermarket that is available in other countries, partly because there is less need for it (hence people are less used to eating a ready meal like a heat and eat). I cook de facto with fresh ingredients, not because I make an effort to find them.
      We don't always have the time to stop and think about what we are eating, as this book demands of its readers. But this creates a kind of snobbery that shouldn't have any place in a highly developed advancing world: What bothers me is the elitism surrounding natural minimally processed food and the overemphasis of elite labelling (eg organic or fairtrade etc). Rural people who often have access to this kind of food, even though they may be resource-rich, are in fact often money-poor, while urban dwellers are often being duped into believing that their food chain is unethical. But even my more 'ethical' eating style does not reflect the way I grew up; we lived in a city, so nearly all of our food was bought; although we did have a vegetable garden, it produced a minimal amount of food (it never matched the degree to production that my current garden produces). So practically everything we ate was bought. I now live in a rural area (coincidentally close to where my parents used to live before they migrated to NZ), and I have the luxury of being closely involved in my food chain. It also helps that I actually liked cooking to begin with, so I've learnt to use the resources around me which are many and varied (I didn't have this possibility available to me in my birth country).
   

*** *** ***

As I devoured these books one-by-one, I was glad to have had the chance to hold them in my hands, and to see what these books could offer me. They're relatively expensive for the recipes/advice they contain, so I know I could not have the luxury of getting my hands on them (Greek libraries rarely stock such books). I am by no means a perfect cook, nor do I know everything there is to know about food and cooking. But I'm way past the basics, and my food chain is much more ethical than the average urban dweller's. Books like these look good on your book shelf, but they don't really add much to your culinary knowledge; in fact, they contained a lot of information that you could easily get on the web. Many recipes are simply rewrites of well-known recipes with a few quirks in them as a selling point. Dictating a common sense approach to eating will only work when you are preaching to the converted (and possibly those with a bigger wallet). At any rate, many of the ideals can't really be implemented in the urban environment they were intended for, where people work long hours a long distance away from their kitchens. I envisage weekend hobby cooks working their way through the recipes (and bedtime readers nodding off with the bedside lamp on as they wade through the advice sections). Having said that, gastrosexuals will take delight in such books.

More than anything else, these books made me aware of how easy it is to get a book published these days, but how hard it is to make that book have a long-lasting effect. If I ever write a book myself, it will have to contain something new, not just a regurgitation of my blog. I don't just want to copy myself into print.

The two non-food books that I also read while in London were 17 Equations that Changed the World (£7.59) and 50 Mathematical Ideas You Really Need to Know (£2.99). Both these quirky titles give you the creepy (and again elitist) feeling that you are missing out on learning something utterly essential if you don't read them. But don't despair: get onto Amazon, and click the 'Look Inside' feature for both titles. The contents of each book are listed in detail, and you can look up each equation/mathematical idea, one by one, on the internet. You may not get the particular author's point of view, but the knowledge contained in each book is not denied to you either. The cheaper title is part of a larger series of books compacting other sets of 50 'significant global events' (all books have a 'Look Inside' feature), while the more expensive one has been summarised in a 20-page .doc file, which you can print out and use with your children.

You don't really need paper books these days; they are simply nice to hold in your hands because they have a luxurious feel to them. But once you browse them, you may realise that you already knew their contents, as most avid readers will have been reading the same things over the last decade. Paper books are generally more expensive to buy than e-books; people are no longer blind to this fact. Paper books are still highly desirable among many circles, but there is a snob value related to it, which people will surpass as they view the problem in terms of sustainability. Eventually, you run out of storage space, and these days, there is simply too much to read...

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From Athens to Papakura by Nikos Petousis

There was a documentary recently broadcast on Greek TV, which presented a snapshot of the Greeks currently residing in NZ. I hesitate to say that it presented the Greek communities of NZ, because it was a rather disjointed programme. All in all, very interesting, as I saw some familiar faces, and heard some stories from the newcomers of Greek immigrants to NZ. It's not easy to go to NZ as a Greek, as some desperate people believe - you need to know the criteria very well for entry.

Because the programme did not present the Greek community as I knew it, I did not feel much nostalgia as I watched it (so far, it has been broadcast in two parts: you can see them here (for Part 1) and here (for Part 2) even though I had been born, raised and educated among this community. Only towards the end of the second part of the documentary was I moved in any way by the feelings expressed in the show, when Mr Nikos Petousis was interviewed.

Born in 1936 (only 1-3 years younger than my parents), he came to NZ in 1956. Greek immigrants at this time were often poorly educated, unskilled and often from rural backgrounds, making Mr Petousis an oddity for his time (the 1950s), as he explained in the documentary:

"I had just obtained my engineer's licence... I was ready to embrace the earth, the world, a 19-year old youth, with a diploma which I regarded as having a very important value, and my good luck finally brought me here, finally I had left Greece. And that is the thing: with a passion and the utter need to leave Athens, where would you go? No one really knew, a young person doesn't know where he's going to go, all the world feels like it belongs to him..."

Mr Petousis had expressed a higher need in Maslow's hierarchy of needs that he was looking to fulfil in his desire to leave Greece. This is not the same need that my parents had felt when they decided to migrate. My parents came to NZ to work in the jobs that New Zealanders didn't want to do (cleaning, factory work, cooking), whereas Mr Petousis was a trained professional looking to work in his field. It is this factor that differentiates Mr Petousis from most other migrants: he sought a new place to build a new life as a professional away from the grinding poverty of an urban warzone, whereas my parents left a rural environment as unskilled labourers to seek paid urban employment opportunities.

A quick internet search revealed that Mr Petousis had recently published his memoirs. I decided to read his story (it is available as an e-book - it's cheaper on amazon.com than on amazon.co.uk). You never know what you will read in a memoir: perhaps a glorified account of a simple life, a pompous narration of ordinary events told by someone with an inflated ego. My verdict is that Mr Petousis' story is so unique and his descriptions of grinding poverty and hunger so gut-wrenching and nothing like the way poverty and hunger is perceived in crisis-ridden Greece today, that everyone should read it this book to put a few things into perspective. Above all, it is the story of a man with a very strong Greek identity, who did not want to live in Greece, and he had decided this from a very early stage in his life. A Greek man who did not fit into Greek society, a Greek soul and spirit who knew he had no place in the land of his ancestors; I recall the words of Harriet Ann Jacobs: "It is a sad feeling to be afraid of one's native country."

Mr Petousis' harrowing experiences as a young child caught up in the Nazi crossfire of Athens (and the subsequent Greek civil war with its devastating consequences in Athens and Northern/Mainland Greece) do not make light reading. But he has a way of downplaying the severity of the conditions under which he grew up: he tells his story as one of survival, as someone who was determined to come through this destruction alive. No matter how much I would like to think of my parents' life as difficult when they were young children in Crete during WW2, I cannot equate the fear of losing one's life with a subsistence lifestyle. My father never had to sell cigarettes at brothels, while my mother never ate filthy orange peels lying in the gutter to stave off hunger. While Mr Petousis was sailing to NZ, he abhorred queuing for his self-service economy class meals: it reminded him too much of the last time he queued for food - in some cases, the food would run out and he wouldn't get any.

Despite his origins, Mr Petousis had a taste for finer things in life. He knew they existed because he had viewed them from up close in Athens - but he never experienced them. Take ice-cream for example. As an engineering graduate, he came across some American soldiers guarding a building. Although he didn't know English, with the help of some imaginative gestures, he understood that they wanted him to go buy them a couple of ice-creams. They gave him the money, and he brought them the cones, as well as the change. They began to lick their ice-creams as he watched them, but they never gave him any, nor did they give him a tip. At that moment, Mr Petousis battled with his conscience - wouldn't it have been just as righteous to take the money and never return to those soldiers? This dilemma plagued him for many years after the incident occurred.

On arriving to the town where he would be hosted by a New Zealand WW2 veteran, he came off the train, where he saw a sign on what looked like a chicken coop, stating that he had arrived in a place called Papakura. His image of Papakura was not the one he was now looking at. He thought he was coming to the land of his dreams, but on seeing where he arrived, he realised that he was not the country of his dreams: eventually, he came to understand that he had arrived in a country where he could build the life of his dreams, if only he wanted to.

Mr Petousis was an avid fan of classical music, and he came to love theatre and opera, hardly a pasttime of the average Greek migrant of the time. He knew the history of his country very well, and made a concerted effort to connect his modern life with the ancient world of his ancestors, despite the glaring differences between the two societies. He kept clear of any religious groups, as he had seen the destructive power that the church had over his own family. Despite acting as honorary consul for Greece in the Auckland region, he purposely kept himself away from any kind of Greek migrant community as he felt that he had nothing in common with them. They had come to NZ to continue living like Greeks, never fully grasping the opportunities that lay before them in a country that could let them be who they wanted to be.

As he later states in the documentary, gone are the days when an unskilled migrant can pack up and leave with just the clothes on his back, to work in manual labour in another country; the world economy has little need for them in our days All Greeks migrating now are highly educated, with skills and qualifications obtained not just in Greek universities but also in foreign countries. He has this to say about them:

"Inside me, I grieve for these people, they were the ones living a wonderful life in Greece, and now they have felt the need to leave, to go - go where? To New Zealand! If you go a little further than that, you fall into the ocean, the Antartctic, it's so far away, we are at the end of the world."

In a sense, this illustrates the desperation felt among Greeks as they leave their country. The difficulties are not immediately apparent to them; this knowledge sinks in much later. It is not easy to return home, even for a short period, a brief holiday, even in modern times. In a sense, the journey is a one-way trip.

I never met Mr Petousis during my years in NZ, so I am honoured to have met him so many years later, electronically through his book. Unlike him, however, I have chosen to live in Greece, but I am lucky in one major respect. I have come to a country that has been completely reshaped since the crisis. Forget the post-war period, forget EU entry - the crisis is the defining moment that Greece had to change.

We generally cannot go back to the past: only last night, the Greek PM Andonis Samaras said that "Yesterday doesn't fit in our tomorrow". Greek people need to be constantly reminded of the truth in this statement. I feel that these days, with the internet and so much more global connection, we can be who we want to be. Even in crisis-ridden Greece, we really can do this. Imagine a Greek telling the world publicly over the WWW not to buy Greek strawberries like I did in yesterday's post. I fear to think what would have happened in the cushy state-imposed past when a person spoke her mind.

We don't have to accept anything; we can express our anger in a way that we never could, and more importantly, we have support for this, whereas we never did before. I truly believe that the future holds good promise for Greece, because Greece has no other choice but to move forward. It is hard for most people to see this now. But Rome wasn't built in a day, and neither will Athens be.

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New Zealand literature (Λογοτεχνία απο την Νέα Ζηλανδία)

I recall a moment when my way of thinking, being influenced by the people who raised me, in combination with my lack of contact with the mainstream community (due, I suppose, to my parents' avoiding it wherever possible), except as a school pupil/university student/shop assistant, made me get a low mark in a school assignment. I remember this incident with as much clarity as is possible given that it took place over 30 years ago, in my first year of being in a 'clever girls' class group at an academically-inclined mainstream Kiwi high school in the early 1980s, where the subject called simply 'English' was compulsory for all high school students. Generally speaking, I never did do very well in English throughout the three years that I had to take it at high school; my mother thought this to be an indication of my lack of essay writing skills (and I believed her).

Iconic New Zealand literature

In English, we studied a bit of grammar, some essay writing, and quite a bit of English literature chosen among well known British and American authors and titles (eg Shakespeare, To Kill a Mockingbird), as well as the young but growing list of New Zealand works of literature. We read Katherine Mansfield's short stories of life in early New Zealand, some of whose works were set in Wellington near my school area (she was a WGC Old Girl). They show her highly developed people-observation skills depicting the relationships of a fledgling British colony which was establishing some kind of identity modelled on another country. The Doll's House is a good example of this. : 

... the school the Burnell children went to was not at all the kind of place their parents would have chosen if there had been any choice. But there was none. It was the only school for miles. And the consequence was all the children in the neighborhood, the judge's little girls, the doctor's daughters, the store-keeper's children, the milkman's, were forced to mix together... But the line had to be drawn somewhere. It was drawn at the Kelveys. Many of the children, including the Burnells, were not allowed even to speak to them. They walked past the Kelveys with their heads in the air, and as they set the fashion in all matters of behaviour, the Kelveys were shunned by everybody. Even the teacher had a special voice for them, and a special smile for the other children when Lil Kelvey came up to her desk with a bunch of dreadfully common-looking flowers. They were the daughters of a spry, hardworking little washerwoman, who went about from house to house by the day. This was awful enough. But where was Mr. Kelvey? Nobody knew for certain. But everybody said he was in prison. So they were the daughters of a washerwoman and a gaolbird. Very nice company for other people's children!

NZ-born Mansfield was educated in England, and eventually left NZ, preferring Europe where she eventually died after a rather eccentric and very troubled life. 

The God Boy by Ian Cross served to remind us that we are not to blame for who raised us. The story (published in 1957) was a rather sad one of a troubled youngster, but it had its funny moments too. Jimmy Sullivan went to a Catholic school, and one day when he didn't feel like participating class activities, he told a nun that he wasn't able to go swimming (I think - I cannot find an online copy of the book to verify this) because he had his period, something he had heard from his sister.

My first introduction to Maori stories was through Pounamu, Pounamu by Witi Ihimaera, whose works revolved around rural life in Maori families; as a child with an immigrant background, I could relate to these stories very well; Maori and Greeks were minority groups living among an Anglo-Saxon majority. Ihimaera wrote as a reaction against the belief that there were no Maori writers in New Zealand at the time, writing the stories he himself wanted to read, which were missing from the available literature. (Andrea Levy does the same thing - she is another of my favorite writers.)  Pounamu, Pounamu is still described as something every Kiwi should read, even 40 years on. The stories naturally contain many references to racial prejudice, written from both the Maori and the pakeha point of view:

Could the children have done it though? Could they have gone into the henhouse? No.... But you couldn't blame Jack for thinking that tehy had, could you? No, you couldn't .... Stil, he shouldn't have hit Henare. That was unforgiveable. What a mess, what an awful mess. Every conflict with the Heremaias has been a mess. Of suspicion, of doubt, of accusations proven or unproven. If only the Heremaias weren't so large, so obvious. They stick out like a sore thumb in the neighbourhood. they have not yet learnt the art of living with European people who may not understand their ways nor like them. They are essentially good people, but oh so tactless and troublesome at time... Is it any wonder that when some accident happens in the street the Heremaia children are blamed? They bring it upon themselves, really they do!

Maori Girl by Noel Hilliard.is not a savoury novel. It shows us what happens when someone falls out of favour with their rural family, drifts into the city without any guidance and ends up in a state of moral and financial difficulty. In other words, it tells us a familiar story which arouses the mixed feelings of shame, guilt and compassion. Such stories rarely have a happy ending and they are dictated with a "preconceived conclusion" which ends up in predictable tragedy. The story is meant to highlight racial prejudice and social disintegration, but as it also depicts alcohol abuse and promiscuity, it serves as an illustration of corrupted morality. 

Netta, a Maori girl, leaves her provincial home after quarrelling with her father who was against her doing pakeha things (she was seen with white men). She goes to Wellington, where she finds work as a cleaner in a boarding house. The company she keeps here led her to meeting the low-life pakeha Eric who moves in with her. After a bad relationship which also caused her to lose her job and home, she eventually meets pakeha Arthur after a casual night out. Arthur falls in love with Netta. Netta realises she's pregnant and Arthur makes arrangements for the baby's arrival. But he then realises that Netta was pregnant before he met her, and he breaks up with her, although he feels shame and guilt for what he does:

... the point of Arthur's guilt and dissatisfaction is to pass on to the pakeha reader the guilt and dissatisfaction he should feel at what his society has done to Netta..., and any one of dozens of other Maori girls.

We also studied Bruce Mason's play The Pohutukawa Tree, published at about the same time as Maori Girl (1960), which also dealt with a Maori girl's pregnancy to a pakeha. In this case, Roy didn't want to marry Queenie, because she was Maori. Even though he liked her, he perceived that the differences between their cultures were too great. Queenie's mother dies from the grief she felt of the decline in Maori values of her children (her son had smashed up a church in a fit of rage). 

We read parts of Maori Girl and The Pohutukawa Tree in class and for homework, and the teacher also gave us an assignment to complete on them. Although I can't remember the exact wording of the questions, one was something to the likes of:

How do you feel about Arthur's/Roy's behaviour at the end of his relationship with Netta/Queenie? Was he justified in breaking up with Netta/Queenie?

If you're a Greek girl and you've been raised by Greek parents in a non-Greek environment, you'll know that both Arthur's and Roy's behaviour was hardly surprising and that they would both dump their girlfriends (because they weren't very stable characters. Your mother would have warned you about them too. You'd feel sorry for Netta/Queenie, but you would also know that the pressure she would be facing in this situation would not allow for greater leniency to be shown towards her. Netta and Queenie had in a way made the bed they were lying on (at the age of 15, you'd be influenced by your mother on this one). Arthur and Roy left a relationship as freely as they had entered it, so they could never have been that reliable in a relationship which carried responsibility. ("Good Greek boys don't just turn up out of nowhere", I can imagine my mother saying.) Arthur also felt lied to, while Roy had to face the pressures of his own family's beliefs. Maybe it's ultimately the way Netta's parents would have felt too had they known about their daughter's pregnancy; Queenie's mother in fact did want her daughter to have a wedding (but not a white one, with the knowledge that she was already pregnant):

"It is in fact the commonest failing in the attitude of people who claim to be sympathetic to Maoris that they will not appreciate that there are differences in the traditions, the outlook and the aspirations of Maoris, and further, that many of these differences are an advantage in that they enable Maoris to cope with the changes that social, economic and policy pressures are forcing on them. Many socialists, like many other pakehas, assume that such differences are inferiorities; and one is likely to be called a racialist if one insists on them." 

The above quote comes from a review of Maori Girl, written a year after the book appeared (1960). It helps that I read this now as I try to justify my own opinions back then. We mainly remember the surface details of such sad stories:

... it is the subsequent and much simpler sequence of events that most pakeha readers will remember: and socialists should be careful not to fall for the temptation to take this as simply an indictment of landladies and restaurateurs who either discriminate against Maori girls or exploit them: the contemplation of such practices, because one condemns them, can give one a very smug conscience. For this section of the book is an accusation against pakeha society itself, the assumptions of which are shared by a great number of those who condemn racial discrimination.

I didn't have this review on hand to show my English teacher, and it is indeed interesting to see the book being discussed in this way as early as 1961, when political correctness was not even a concept then. I completed the assignment, writing as honestly as I thought I should, from my own experiences, without asking my parents (who would have been astounded to think that this kind of reading material was being used with 15-year-olds) or getting any other help. But in my liberal-minded mainstream (and at the time predominantly pakeha) New Zealand high school, socialist ideals, liberal thinking and compassionate protestantism were being drummed into our minds, and my kind of answer just happened to be 'wrong'. I recall the teacher's remarks: something about taking Netta's predicament into more consideration and the fact that Arthur was actually in love with her, so he could have been a father to her baby, even if it wasn't his. Roy too was in love with Queenie, and the racial issue should not have been considered before others.

The assumption of right/wrong answers in a society that was made up of various cultures was not really a good one on the part of the teacher. The view of morality was from the side of the pakeha, but it was also the pakeha that created the situation that corrupted Netta and Queenie. My own Greekness in this case could be said to have been viewed indirectly by the teacher as simply a part of my adjustment process in multi-cultural New Zealand. In other words, it would only be a matter of time that I would start to see things in the more 'correct' manner.

But even though political correctness has come a long way in the western world, the way the world is now shaping itself shows that we still have a long way to go yet. Some ideas will never quite be politically correct because they are too enshrined in a non-liberal framework which work differently for different cultures. When we can't agree on how an issue must be handled, we have to agree that we are indeed different, and not the same at all.

©All Rights Reserved/Organically cooked. No part of this blog may be reproduced and/or copied by any means without prior consent from Maria Verivaki.

The Two Faces of January by Patricia Highsmith

Living in a small town in Greece, in her recent past, had a very negative ring to it. Pressure from international trends often led to small towns being regarded as symbols of backwardness. Until the crisis hit, the general attitudes towards small Greek towns were usually disparaging. Admittedly, small towns have always lacked the faster pace of progress of a capital city or a large urban conglomeration, and they often lack symbols of urban culture that resemble progress, like regular theatre showings, 24-hour supermarkets and brand-labelled fast-food outlets, but such institutions are only possible when there is a large population available to sustain them, or if such elements are seen as desirable by a community. Lack of opportunities still plagues small towns, although this problem could also be attributed to a disinterest by the community to develop feasible opportunities.

Hania in the early 1960s, as Patricia Highsmith describes it, while using the island of Crete as the setting of her novel The Two Faces of January, is a boring dusty old-fashioned-looking town, where nothing interesting happens. The story is set in the depths of winter, which has always been regarded by most Greek urbanites as the most boring time to be in the επαρχία away from the mainland, because the islands' sea-and-sun image do not allow for regular activities associated with island life to take place (swimming, sunbathing, dining outdoors). This is still very much true in the second millenium. The Mediterranean islands may be some of the most beautiful in the world, but they seem to have a 'Closed till next year' appearance in the wintertime, when the rains come in deluges, and transportation is hampered.

So is μεσιμέρι (mesiMEri), the middle of the day, whether it's summer or winter; the town empties out eerily at this time of the day, something that visitors find disconcerting, even in modern times, as many of my students have remarked, particularly concerning weekends. On Sunday, all the commercial stores are closed, giving a ghostly appearance to what seems like a modern town, judging from the store-fronts.

Chester, a character from Highsmith's novel, and his wife Colette arrive in Hania at this time of the day, and are faced with an image that arouses feelings of poverty mixed with rural peasantry:

Photo: Roula Spartali

Chania, at 3.30[pm], presented a town square sprinkled with idle men, centred with a cement memorial statue of some sort, and ringed around with various shops and restaurants. It had a backwater, fifty-years-behind-the-times look of certain towns Chester had seen in the United States, an atmosphere that inspired him to wonder how the inhabitants could possibly make a living. Consequently Chania appeared a little sad. It was not nearly as big as Chester had expected... They strolled in the direction of the sea, which was visible down the street from the main square. The town seemed to offer nothing in the way of beauty. The shops were tiny and poor-looking, there was nothing like a museum or a government building in view. The port was a long curve with a wide wharf going out into the water. The only boats in the harbour were two old tankers.

Many small towns all over Europe, in order to increase their touristic potential, advertise themselves as a place for a weekend or mini-break. Hania, however urbanised it may look, is not really the kind of place a self-confessed urbanite would ever like to find themselves in. Rydal, who travelled to Hania with Chester and Colette, finds it to be a suitable place for contemplation more than anything else:

Photo: Magda Vogiatzi

The paper of Chania, a slim, four-sheet affair, reported what Rydal had expected, absolutely nothing. Rydal asked and was told that the Iraklion and Athens papers would be on sale that evening.  Rydal walked into a cafe and had a cup of coffee. It was a dull town, Chania, but Rydal rather like dull towns, because they forced one to look at things - for want of anything else to do - that one might not otherwise notice. Like the number of flowerpots on window-sills as compared with the number in Athens or in other small towns he had been in on the mainland; the number of cripples on the street; the quality of the building materials used in the houses; the variety or lack of variety in the foodstuffs in the market. The public market looked a bit impoverished, like the rest of the town.

The desolation of a boring town is heightened when an unhappy event takes place in it. Unlike in a large city where you can change suburbs, in a small town, there is nowhere to hide:

Photo: Chrysoula Zikou

Chester had never detested any town as much as he detested Chania. The pattern of the buildings on the street of the hotel had taken on a meaning to him: they were a symbol of hell, a trademark of hell, the very face of hell. Chania was where he had lost Colette. Chania was where he had existed for three days like a hunted dog and watched a seedy young bum seduce his wife... Chania reminded him of his second year at Harvard, when the news of his father's bankruptcy had come, and when Annette, the girl he had been engaged to, had broken off the engagement - instantly, on hearing of the bankruptcy... Chania reminded him of all that. Chania reminded him of failure.

Generally speaking, Highsmith's descriptions of Crete are qell on the mark, although there was one which I found to be completely lacking in credibility for the time period that it takes place in:

Photo: Bettina Truper

'They walked to the market, drifted down aisles of shoes and boots that smelled of cattle urine, stared with detachment and wonder at hanging meat, cut in a manner that made the pieces unidentifiable. They bought ice-cream cones and wandered on, holding hands to keep from getting separated. Colette found a loose, buttonless vest... Rydal helped her bargain for it. They got it for thirty drachmas less that the first price the woman had asked for it. 'I don't think people would pay the first price they ask in places like this, do you? Colette said. 'It's silly tourists who make the prices go up everywhere.'... The ruddy-cheeked peasant woman rolled the vest carefully in a sheet of newspaper, tucked the ends in, and presented it to Colette.

In 1960s Hania, the shoes and boots would probably have smelt very animal-ish,  but the hanging meat in the market would all be quite recognisable. It is highly unlikely that any ice-cream was being sold in Hania in January in the 1960s (in fast, winter ice-cream sales are a relatively recent development here). And I don't think Rydal and Colette would have gotten separated in the market of Hania - it wouldn't have been that busy! A more credible food scene describes a meal taken near the market in Hania:

Photo: Chrysoula Zikou

'Can we eat something in a crummy place?' she asked... 'Where the Greeks go?' Smiling, Rydal pulled her by the arm back in the direction of the town. 'Does this town have anything else?' Colette was quite definite about what she wanted. She wanted a hole-in-the-wall, stand-up kind of place, and Rydal found one in a street next to the market. They ate a piece of hot goat meat on a slab of grey bread, and shared a glass of the worst retsina Rydal had ever put in his mouth. 

Photo: Anastasia Tsigounaki

Hania had not cultivated her tourist image in the early 1960s, so no doubt most places looked crummy, and the food would have been quite basic. Our bread certainly does look grey compared to the model bread being propounded in the 1960s, which was a clean white loaf. Most of the best bread in Greece is an off-white colour. But even in the film version of the novel, some of the food items will be part of a product-placement campaign by the sponsors: EPSA soft drinks would have been unheard of in Hania at the time!

Patricia Highsmith's descriptions of Hania have not put me off her story. In fact, the desolate descriptions suit the storyline: a psychological thriller whose main charcaters are all hiding some kidn of skeleton in the cupboard. The descriptions remind me of the complaints I hear from visitors who never really understood the town, visiting it at the wrong time of the year while they were whizzing through Europe on a whilrwind tour of the continent and couldn't find a more convenient or suitable time to come here. The idea of the desolation one feels in a small town which they expected to be different is developed very well by Highsmith, as the characters change their relationships with each other, tending towards hatred and fear.

In fact, I can't wait to see The Two Faces of January played out on the big screen. I will watch it in a cinema which will be located not far from where the shooting of the film took place. I can imagine the rounds of applause every time my dusty town comes into view. I normally wait till the DVD comes out, but this time, I think I will make it to the cinema, where I expect that there will be no empty seats every night The Two Faces of January is showing.

All photos taken in Hania (photo set can be found in Chania Crete by Nikos), during the shooting of The Two Faces of January last month, starring Viggo Morntensen, Kirsten Dunst and Oscar Isaac.


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