Maria Mitsora, On My Aunt’s Shallow Grave White Roses Have Already Bloomed, Trans. by Jacob Moe, Yale University Press, 2018.
read it at Google Books
A collection of short stories by an acclaimed contemporary Greek writer, reminiscent of Lydia Davis and Jenny Offill
This collection assembles sixteen of Maria Mitsora’s short stories in what adds up to be a retrospective of the author’s work, spanning forty years. Moving across the urban netherworld of Athens to imagined Latin American towns and science-fiction dystopias, Mitsora animates the alternatingly dark and revelatory aspects of the human psyche, depicting a world in which her protagonists are caught between reality and myth, predestination and chance, rationality and twisted dreams.
Mitsora led a generation of writers whose work articulated major transitions in the Greek literary scene, from 1970s historical and political sensibilities shaped in response to the military Junta to a contemporary focus on a fragmented, multicultural world. Her consistent experimentation with the short story form—a dominant genre in Greek prose writing since the nineteenth century—ranges from psychologically dark, surrealist work to more recent reflective and poetic writings.
This collection assembles sixteen of Maria Mitsora’s short stories in what adds up to be a retrospective of the author’s work, spanning forty years. Moving across the urban netherworld of Athens to imagined Latin American towns and science-fiction dystopias, Mitsora animates the alternatingly dark and revelatory aspects of the human psyche, depicting a world in which her protagonists are caught between reality and myth, predestination and chance, rationality and twisted dreams.
Mitsora led a generation of writers whose work articulated major transitions in the Greek literary scene, from 1970s historical and political sensibilities shaped in response to the military Junta to a contemporary focus on a fragmented, multicultural world. Her consistent experimentation with the short story form—a dominant genre in Greek prose writing since the nineteenth century—ranges from psychologically dark, surrealist work to more recent reflective and poetic writings.
At times I wish I could get to the beginning of my story. But the begining is lost in darkness even more than the end.
Maria Mitsora’s writing is beautiful, translated from Greek to English by Jacob Moe. I always wonder about translations, how much of the author’s work can suffer or shine is dependant on the translator. It is an interesting collection, strange at times, heartbreaking, stories blooming where they please. Some of the stories are broody, which is exactly why I enjoyed them so much, full of dreams which are as disjointed as our troubling thoughts. In Versions of Persephone, the character Axan ‘is on time for her rendezvous with the explosion.’Aren’t we all, of course in her case it is a physical explosion, she is in the underworld, trapped by pain. Her father, king of it all, the criminal warlord.
In Brown Dog in November, Nino needs to refrain from barking, as he mourns the loss of his Eleni. Eleni, the one woman who transfixed him, the one whose traces he still hunts for. What violence haunts him, as divorce from his love eviscerates him still? Who is the young fresh girl, another Eleni? It’s disturbing, the way he loves, if he loves at all. Eleni who wanted him to ‘walk in the sun’, Eleni who could calm the wild dogs. She, who turned her back on him.
Memories flash and dim, time rushes and stops. How much do we know of the storm inside our loved ones? In Stormy Verbs (my favorite), Verbia wants her beloved to feel the force of a river but it is the painful memories of the place that make that force dangerous, an abyss of pain. It is this place that created in Verbia what he fells for, her ‘fragile but unbreakable balance.’ A gut-wrenching story of regret and shame, short yet powerful.
Sipping the ‘distant froth’ of childhood and memory, the stories in this collection can be biting and bitter, lost characters looking for escape or return to themselves and each other. Stories we all read differently, feel uniquely. Dreamy at times, people as distant as a fading thought, struggling against the mundane and soon we all reach The End of the Show much like the wasp, sprayed with poison to oblivion and yet with the capability to fly away in spite of it all, a surprise to whatever mean eye is watching, waiting for us to die. I got lost in the writing, a collection that engaged me. - Lolly K D
bookstalkerblog.wordpress.com/2018/08/20/on-my-aunts-shallow-grave-white-roses-have-already-bloomed-by-maria-mitsora/
"And now as the story ends, my life must begin. I must build it from scratch though I'm unfamiliar with the materials. First I think of fasting to cleanse my body, and then of cleaning the small apartment, washing the windows though the view is cold and unremarkable."
An ode to the refracted everyday life, which is seen through a playful and sometimes melancholic mirror. A series of vignettes, interlocking stories, in which the protagonists find themselves tangled in the mantle of reality and myth, logic and dreams, with magical realism dominating the pages and language moving freely between bilingual and biblical. In this flow of consciousness short story collection, the subject possesses a dispersive identity, acts in a world that although named "Athens" is more and more likely to deny the narrowly grounded anchorages of the place. According to the translator of the issue
"Mitsora's world is such that it lets readers believe that a spiteful act of fiction might just be avenged in real life, and that the end is, well, never quite the end."
Indeed, the stories seemingly do not end, the adventures of the heroes seem to go on, along with the philosophical quests, the Baudelairian spleen and the obsession with fairy tales, which can only be interpreted as longing for an escape from reality. The inextricable relationship of the plot with tradition, and in particular with the ancient Greek myth, is both remarkable and prominent in the titles of the short stories; however, despite the mythological signals and ideological commands in human memory, the microcosm and not the mythological element is its raw material and ultimately give the atmosphere. - Sophie G
https://www.netgalley.co.uk/book/145326/reviews
Maria Mitsora’s writing is beautiful, translated from Greek to English by Jacob Moe. I always wonder about translations, how much of the author’s work can suffer or shine is dependant on the translator. It is an interesting collection, strange at times, heartbreaking, stories blooming where they please. Some of the stories are broody, which is exactly why I enjoyed them so much, full of dreams which are as disjointed as our troubling thoughts. In Versions of Persephone, the character Axan ‘is on time for her rendezvous with the explosion.’Aren’t we all, of course in her case it is a physical explosion, she is in the underworld, trapped by pain. Her father, king of it all, the criminal warlord.
In Brown Dog in November, Nino needs to refrain from barking, as he mourns the loss of his Eleni. Eleni, the one woman who transfixed him, the one whose traces he still hunts for. What violence haunts him, as divorce from his love eviscerates him still? Who is the young fresh girl, another Eleni? It’s disturbing, the way he loves, if he loves at all. Eleni who wanted him to ‘walk in the sun’, Eleni who could calm the wild dogs. She, who turned her back on him.
Memories flash and dim, time rushes and stops. How much do we know of the storm inside our loved ones? In Stormy Verbs (my favorite), Verbia wants her beloved to feel the force of a river but it is the painful memories of the place that make that force dangerous, an abyss of pain. It is this place that created in Verbia what he fells for, her ‘fragile but unbreakable balance.’ A gut-wrenching story of regret and shame, short yet powerful.
Sipping the ‘distant froth’ of childhood and memory, the stories in this collection can be biting and bitter, lost characters looking for escape or return to themselves and each other. Stories we all read differently, feel uniquely. Dreamy at times, people as distant as a fading thought, struggling against the mundane and soon we all reach The End of the Show much like the wasp, sprayed with poison to oblivion and yet with the capability to fly away in spite of it all, a surprise to whatever mean eye is watching, waiting for us to die. I got lost in the writing, a collection that engaged me. - Lolly K D
bookstalkerblog.wordpress.com/2018/08/20/on-my-aunts-shallow-grave-white-roses-have-already-bloomed-by-maria-mitsora/
"And now as the story ends, my life must begin. I must build it from scratch though I'm unfamiliar with the materials. First I think of fasting to cleanse my body, and then of cleaning the small apartment, washing the windows though the view is cold and unremarkable."
An ode to the refracted everyday life, which is seen through a playful and sometimes melancholic mirror. A series of vignettes, interlocking stories, in which the protagonists find themselves tangled in the mantle of reality and myth, logic and dreams, with magical realism dominating the pages and language moving freely between bilingual and biblical. In this flow of consciousness short story collection, the subject possesses a dispersive identity, acts in a world that although named "Athens" is more and more likely to deny the narrowly grounded anchorages of the place. According to the translator of the issue
"Mitsora's world is such that it lets readers believe that a spiteful act of fiction might just be avenged in real life, and that the end is, well, never quite the end."
Indeed, the stories seemingly do not end, the adventures of the heroes seem to go on, along with the philosophical quests, the Baudelairian spleen and the obsession with fairy tales, which can only be interpreted as longing for an escape from reality. The inextricable relationship of the plot with tradition, and in particular with the ancient Greek myth, is both remarkable and prominent in the titles of the short stories; however, despite the mythological signals and ideological commands in human memory, the microcosm and not the mythological element is its raw material and ultimately give the atmosphere. - Sophie G
https://www.netgalley.co.uk/book/145326/reviews
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