Petros Abatzoglou, What does Mrs. Freeman Want?, Trans. by , Dalkey Archive Press, 2005.
While lying on a beach in Greece with an accommodating female companion, the narrator of this novel, Petros Abatzoglou (also the name of the author), describes the peculiar life story and marriage of Mrs. Freeman. By turns digressive, tender, humorous, and pedantic, the narrator interrupts his monologue only when he wants something from his companion, usually another drink. In relating the story of Mrs. Freeman--a fiercely independent woman--the narrator exemplifies almost all the characteristics of a self-centered male. Obsessed with food, alcohol, and the need to be the center of a woman's attention, he paints a mental picture of the elusive Mrs. Freeman, and his own vision of the ideal woman.
What does Mrs. Freeman Want ? isn't exactly a question that plagues the narrator, but he is curious, and on a sunny day at the beach goes on about her at considerable length in relating her life-story to his female companion. The narrator -- named Petros Abatzoglou -- doesn't say all that much about himself (or his relationship with the considerably older Mrs. Freeman), focussing almost completely on her life, and mainly on her relationship with the man who became her husband, a professor named Freeman. There are digressions -- Petros adds his two cents on a few subjects that crop up -- and he enjoys his ouzo and the occasional dip in the water as he tells his tale, but it's Mrs. Freeman that is at the centre of the story.
Petros is now middle-aged and living -- at least on this day -- quite the carefree life. Mrs. Freeman (herself now over ninety) clearly made quite the impression on him, though their exact relationship -- and his fascination with her story -- aren't really made clear.
What Mrs. Freeman wanted over the course of her life does come up, and the answer varies. Early on, landing Freeman is an obvious goal, while after World War II both she and her husband find themselves: "devoid of ambition, and, naturally, of expectation." Part of what appears to appeal to the narrator about Mrs. Freeman is those changing ambitions and desires -- especially, presumably, the final ambition of the old lady, the fact that even at her advanced age (which is frequently mentioned) she still wants something.
It's an odd, second-hand account, the narrator after all able only to tell (and refracting through his own limited point of view) what Mrs. Freeman confided in him. He goes on at considerable length about her courtship and the early years of her marriage, for example. Freeman, who becomes a well-known and respected scholar, doesn't interest him nearly as much as his wife, perhaps because:
It's an interesting enough life-story that's related, and the removed (and interrupted) narrative is appealing, but, like the narrator, it all seems to lack a bit of drive and purpose. It does make for a pleasant enough small beach read, however. - http://www.complete-review.com/reviews/greece/abatzogl.htm
Though the narrator of Petros Abatzoglou’s novel, also named Petros Abatzoglou, is half in the bag from start to finish, he can still pull off a nice metaphor. An alcoholic’s body is “possessed by… an uncoordinated mobility, like a dog who has lost the scent and no longer knows which way to go.” The same could be said for Petros’s brain, as he lies on the beach with a female companion, telling her the story of Mr. and Mrs. Freeman’s romance, which may be a good enough way to pass the time between glasses of ouzo, but not without the glasses of ouzo.
He begins his monologue on the subject for no reason he can muster and concedes early on that even he hasn’t the “slightest interest.” But he pushes ahead, trying to recover the scent he lost when he, say, bragged about his “Nobel” or finally broke things down for us: “man drowns in water and fish drown in air.” It’s not clear why Petros knows Mrs. Freeman. She’s in her nineties and alone, and she’s told him her story “innumerable” times: how as a student she reeled in her husband-to-be (a gentle, conservative linguistics professor) and proceeded through the usual bad sex, motherhood, and diets till he had his fatal stroke on the crapper. She’s an “extraordinary woman,” says Petros, and yet the discrepancy between his high estimation of her and the quality of his reasons is almost laughable. She has “tremendous willpower”—that is, “if things don’t turn out the way she wants them to, she takes it as a personal insult.” She’s “never had any regrets”! She “never dreams”! She refuses to acknowledge even the “existence” of “anything that’s unpleasant”! Petros goes so far as to endow her encroaching senility with spiritual weight, and wonders admiringly what she’s “fighting for so fiercely,” when she doesn’t seem to be fighting at all. It could be an attempt to inject some narrative thrust into his story, but if it did he’s been carried away again already, and again, etc.
His digressions most often focus on food—probably due to the drunken quickening of his appetite—and approach the pornographic (“steaming hot pies,” “succulent sausages”), not less for his use of hunger to mean a craving for a veal chop or for sex in equal measures, and sometimes both. Then, ten pages from the end, Petros mentions being a “child under Nazi occupation [who] got crippled with rheumatism and nearly starved to death.” (The real Petros Abatzoglou grew up in Nazi-occupied Greece.) It should be enough to knock the reader out of the book’s narcotic miasma, which appears “to be assuming the aspect of an endless nightmare… made up of senseless details and repetitions.” But the revelation is over so quickly and arises out of what’s so plainly a mix of facts, half-truths, and projections, that it exposes only the potential for a shift in context. Likewise, when we finally get Mrs. Freeman’s answer to the title question, it portends a disingenuousness suggesting it’s at best a rhetorical nostrum for Petros’s own existential worries.
These are the seeds of an aesthetic of incompetence. Not in the absurdist sense of stagnation and perpetual unresolve, but in its lack of urgency to move in any meaningful direction. Abatzoglou’s not unique in taking the mundane as a subject, but he resists dramatic impulse with an uncommon, illuminating commitment. Despite his long career (he died in 2004) that includes two Greek National Book Awards, What Does Mrs. Freeman Want?, the 1988 winner, is his first appearance in English. One can only hope for future translations, so we might follow this curious scent. —Darren Reidy
‘And I really don’t see why we should leave Andros and go off to some island’, begins the prolific narration of Petros Abatzoglu’s What Does Mrs Freeman Want? This bastard copy of the author, ‘my dear Petros’, as he calls himself, launches himself on the reader with aplomb and such a narrator is an ideal tribute to the Greek author, who died last year at the age of 73. Born in 1931, Abatzoglu grew up in Greece during the Nazi occupation and went on to write journalism and fiction. He won the Greek National Book Award twice, in 1965 for Balance of Terror and in 1988 for What Does Mrs Freeman Want?
D.H. Lawrence famously stated, ‘never trust the teller, trust the tale’ and Abatzoglu’s playful presentation of a pseudo-self leaves the reader a little dazed. Petros’ tale is full of contradictions and this is reflected in a meta-narrative about language as characters try to measure the value and purpose of words. Initially, Mr. Freeman, a linguist, thinks that ‘words are lethal weapons’, yet he learns from his wife, Mrs Freeman, that ‘they are simply the answer to some need, a human need’. In his devotion to his wife, Mr Freeman tells his students ‘unless words express emotion indeed passion, they are nothing more than dead matter’, yet when his marriage loses its fire, he insists that words are ‘independent entities, practically existing on their own, unaffected by us humans’. Abatzoglu’s commentary suggests that fickle human nature taints any empirical ambitions to organise or understand language and it affirms that emotion cannot be eradicated from a human view of the world.
The narrator, Petros, is the filter or frame for Abatzoglu’s story. While liberally plying himself with booze – ‘I might as well have another ouzo’ crops up a number of times – Petros, tells the story of a fiercely independent English woman. The narrator’s location is gradually revealed as a Greek island and the subject to whom Petros addresses his meandering narrative is a scantily-clad, lithe young woman sunbathing on the beach. The storytelling often diverges into comic rants:
Ultimately Petros’ telling of Mrs. Freeman’s story encourages our respect. The heroine of the book is the opposite of the passive blonde to whom the narrator addresses his monologue. Some of the most comic interludes in the book are created by the ironic or sarcastic comments that Petros aims at his companion:
Mrs Freeman is an ideal of a romantic heroine with monumental passions and obsessive fervour. The story describes her courtship with Mr. Freeman, their subsequent marriage and the conclusion to her domestic life. At the beginning of the novel, Mrs Freeman is figured as a character burning with desire and desperate for an object worthy of her passion. Abatzoglu comically describes her courtship with her future husband as a military assault as she switches from ‘trench warfare’ to ‘blitzkrieg, with armoured vehicles and 18 and 22 mm guns reducing the chair of linguistics to cinders’. Abatzoglu often uses bathos for comic effect, deflating Mrs Freeman’s magnificent passion, which is restrained by the ordinariness of her husband and the mundane surroundings that she inhabits. She is described in pursuit of Mr Freeman ‘like a tigress stalking her victim, whiskers quivering in exquisite anticipation, lay in ambush behind some shrubs in the University grounds’. The predatory image is deflated by the mundane trappings of her environment and it is this kind of comparison which creates the wry humour of the book.
Although Mrs Freeman announces ‘I’m not interested in daydreams…I want proof, I want facts’, the tragic aspect to this novel is that life simply does not live up to her expectations. One episode describes Mrs Freeman’s first childhood encounter with death. The narrator describes her questioning adults about her dead grandmother, who reply, ‘she’s gone far away …but she’ll come back and bring us chocolate and ice-cream and pretty dolls’. The narrator confirms that ‘ever since then Mrs Freeman has been convinced that the dead simply go off on a journey’. Later in the novel when Mrs Freeman comes to the end of her life, her husband’s death is a terrible truth that must be faced. The imagination has an alchemistic power, yet ultimately the starkness of reality cannot be escaped.
The narrator confides that Mrs Freeman had told him that imagination ‘is like a cancerous growth in men’s minds, it only leads to disaster’. Mrs Freeman’s adamance does not ring true and ultimately, it is her burning imagination which creates the tragedy of her later life.
One role of the narrator, Petros, is to be the harbinger of cold truth. Petros’ view of harsh reality contrasts with Mrs Freeman’s optimism about death. Petros describes his own childish encounter with death remembering the grotesque image of a snake swallowing a mouse. However, even Petros has some imaginative verve and when the dead mouse disappears from the snake’s gullet, he questions whether it ever existed. To understand death involves the ultimate flight of the imagination.
- Zoe Brigley
Petros is now middle-aged and living -- at least on this day -- quite the carefree life. Mrs. Freeman (herself now over ninety) clearly made quite the impression on him, though their exact relationship -- and his fascination with her story -- aren't really made clear.
What Mrs. Freeman wanted over the course of her life does come up, and the answer varies. Early on, landing Freeman is an obvious goal, while after World War II both she and her husband find themselves: "devoid of ambition, and, naturally, of expectation." Part of what appears to appeal to the narrator about Mrs. Freeman is those changing ambitions and desires -- especially, presumably, the final ambition of the old lady, the fact that even at her advanced age (which is frequently mentioned) she still wants something.
It's an odd, second-hand account, the narrator after all able only to tell (and refracting through his own limited point of view) what Mrs. Freeman confided in him. He goes on at considerable length about her courtship and the early years of her marriage, for example. Freeman, who becomes a well-known and respected scholar, doesn't interest him nearly as much as his wife, perhaps because:
he was a tormented creature running after elusive words in order to discover some meaning to life.Mrs. Freeman's approach -- though she too isn't always satisfied either -- appeals to him much more. He presents her as some sort of ideal, despite her clearly not being a model the woman he is with might be prodded to emulate -- nor her being a lover (or even mother-) figure for him.
It's an interesting enough life-story that's related, and the removed (and interrupted) narrative is appealing, but, like the narrator, it all seems to lack a bit of drive and purpose. It does make for a pleasant enough small beach read, however. - http://www.complete-review.com/reviews/greece/abatzogl.htm
Though the narrator of Petros Abatzoglou’s novel, also named Petros Abatzoglou, is half in the bag from start to finish, he can still pull off a nice metaphor. An alcoholic’s body is “possessed by… an uncoordinated mobility, like a dog who has lost the scent and no longer knows which way to go.” The same could be said for Petros’s brain, as he lies on the beach with a female companion, telling her the story of Mr. and Mrs. Freeman’s romance, which may be a good enough way to pass the time between glasses of ouzo, but not without the glasses of ouzo.
He begins his monologue on the subject for no reason he can muster and concedes early on that even he hasn’t the “slightest interest.” But he pushes ahead, trying to recover the scent he lost when he, say, bragged about his “Nobel” or finally broke things down for us: “man drowns in water and fish drown in air.” It’s not clear why Petros knows Mrs. Freeman. She’s in her nineties and alone, and she’s told him her story “innumerable” times: how as a student she reeled in her husband-to-be (a gentle, conservative linguistics professor) and proceeded through the usual bad sex, motherhood, and diets till he had his fatal stroke on the crapper. She’s an “extraordinary woman,” says Petros, and yet the discrepancy between his high estimation of her and the quality of his reasons is almost laughable. She has “tremendous willpower”—that is, “if things don’t turn out the way she wants them to, she takes it as a personal insult.” She’s “never had any regrets”! She “never dreams”! She refuses to acknowledge even the “existence” of “anything that’s unpleasant”! Petros goes so far as to endow her encroaching senility with spiritual weight, and wonders admiringly what she’s “fighting for so fiercely,” when she doesn’t seem to be fighting at all. It could be an attempt to inject some narrative thrust into his story, but if it did he’s been carried away again already, and again, etc.
His digressions most often focus on food—probably due to the drunken quickening of his appetite—and approach the pornographic (“steaming hot pies,” “succulent sausages”), not less for his use of hunger to mean a craving for a veal chop or for sex in equal measures, and sometimes both. Then, ten pages from the end, Petros mentions being a “child under Nazi occupation [who] got crippled with rheumatism and nearly starved to death.” (The real Petros Abatzoglou grew up in Nazi-occupied Greece.) It should be enough to knock the reader out of the book’s narcotic miasma, which appears “to be assuming the aspect of an endless nightmare… made up of senseless details and repetitions.” But the revelation is over so quickly and arises out of what’s so plainly a mix of facts, half-truths, and projections, that it exposes only the potential for a shift in context. Likewise, when we finally get Mrs. Freeman’s answer to the title question, it portends a disingenuousness suggesting it’s at best a rhetorical nostrum for Petros’s own existential worries.
These are the seeds of an aesthetic of incompetence. Not in the absurdist sense of stagnation and perpetual unresolve, but in its lack of urgency to move in any meaningful direction. Abatzoglou’s not unique in taking the mundane as a subject, but he resists dramatic impulse with an uncommon, illuminating commitment. Despite his long career (he died in 2004) that includes two Greek National Book Awards, What Does Mrs. Freeman Want?, the 1988 winner, is his first appearance in English. One can only hope for future translations, so we might follow this curious scent. —Darren Reidy
‘And I really don’t see why we should leave Andros and go off to some island’, begins the prolific narration of Petros Abatzoglu’s What Does Mrs Freeman Want? This bastard copy of the author, ‘my dear Petros’, as he calls himself, launches himself on the reader with aplomb and such a narrator is an ideal tribute to the Greek author, who died last year at the age of 73. Born in 1931, Abatzoglu grew up in Greece during the Nazi occupation and went on to write journalism and fiction. He won the Greek National Book Award twice, in 1965 for Balance of Terror and in 1988 for What Does Mrs Freeman Want?
D.H. Lawrence famously stated, ‘never trust the teller, trust the tale’ and Abatzoglu’s playful presentation of a pseudo-self leaves the reader a little dazed. Petros’ tale is full of contradictions and this is reflected in a meta-narrative about language as characters try to measure the value and purpose of words. Initially, Mr. Freeman, a linguist, thinks that ‘words are lethal weapons’, yet he learns from his wife, Mrs Freeman, that ‘they are simply the answer to some need, a human need’. In his devotion to his wife, Mr Freeman tells his students ‘unless words express emotion indeed passion, they are nothing more than dead matter’, yet when his marriage loses its fire, he insists that words are ‘independent entities, practically existing on their own, unaffected by us humans’. Abatzoglu’s commentary suggests that fickle human nature taints any empirical ambitions to organise or understand language and it affirms that emotion cannot be eradicated from a human view of the world.
The narrator, Petros, is the filter or frame for Abatzoglu’s story. While liberally plying himself with booze – ‘I might as well have another ouzo’ crops up a number of times – Petros, tells the story of a fiercely independent English woman. The narrator’s location is gradually revealed as a Greek island and the subject to whom Petros addresses his meandering narrative is a scantily-clad, lithe young woman sunbathing on the beach. The storytelling often diverges into comic rants:
if a close friend called me Mr. Abatzoglu, and especially if he emphasized the Mister, I would waste no time answering back, “Don’t you Mister me, you slob. If that’s your idea of making fun of me”Yet there is a deep self awareness and a playful sense of self mockery in these digressions. Abatzoglu creates an endearing aspect to the teller whose epicurean revelling contrasts with his more philosophical speeches.
Ultimately Petros’ telling of Mrs. Freeman’s story encourages our respect. The heroine of the book is the opposite of the passive blonde to whom the narrator addresses his monologue. Some of the most comic interludes in the book are created by the ironic or sarcastic comments that Petros aims at his companion:
Of course I see your point, it must be wonderful to feel the sun scorching you, burning you through and through, sucking all the moisture out of you. Yes, of course I understand my dear.In contrast, Petros describes Mrs Freeman as ‘no ordinary woman; she wasn’t one of those silly suburban girls who enjoy reading cheap magazines like Donna’. Petros’ story is a kind of moral lecture given for the benefit of the listening companion in an effort to present a sublime model of the female spirit.
Mrs Freeman is an ideal of a romantic heroine with monumental passions and obsessive fervour. The story describes her courtship with Mr. Freeman, their subsequent marriage and the conclusion to her domestic life. At the beginning of the novel, Mrs Freeman is figured as a character burning with desire and desperate for an object worthy of her passion. Abatzoglu comically describes her courtship with her future husband as a military assault as she switches from ‘trench warfare’ to ‘blitzkrieg, with armoured vehicles and 18 and 22 mm guns reducing the chair of linguistics to cinders’. Abatzoglu often uses bathos for comic effect, deflating Mrs Freeman’s magnificent passion, which is restrained by the ordinariness of her husband and the mundane surroundings that she inhabits. She is described in pursuit of Mr Freeman ‘like a tigress stalking her victim, whiskers quivering in exquisite anticipation, lay in ambush behind some shrubs in the University grounds’. The predatory image is deflated by the mundane trappings of her environment and it is this kind of comparison which creates the wry humour of the book.
Although Mrs Freeman announces ‘I’m not interested in daydreams…I want proof, I want facts’, the tragic aspect to this novel is that life simply does not live up to her expectations. One episode describes Mrs Freeman’s first childhood encounter with death. The narrator describes her questioning adults about her dead grandmother, who reply, ‘she’s gone far away …but she’ll come back and bring us chocolate and ice-cream and pretty dolls’. The narrator confirms that ‘ever since then Mrs Freeman has been convinced that the dead simply go off on a journey’. Later in the novel when Mrs Freeman comes to the end of her life, her husband’s death is a terrible truth that must be faced. The imagination has an alchemistic power, yet ultimately the starkness of reality cannot be escaped.
The narrator confides that Mrs Freeman had told him that imagination ‘is like a cancerous growth in men’s minds, it only leads to disaster’. Mrs Freeman’s adamance does not ring true and ultimately, it is her burning imagination which creates the tragedy of her later life.
One role of the narrator, Petros, is to be the harbinger of cold truth. Petros’ view of harsh reality contrasts with Mrs Freeman’s optimism about death. Petros describes his own childish encounter with death remembering the grotesque image of a snake swallowing a mouse. However, even Petros has some imaginative verve and when the dead mouse disappears from the snake’s gullet, he questions whether it ever existed. To understand death involves the ultimate flight of the imagination.
- Zoe Brigley
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