“Fine letters”, the new novel by Ioanna Karystianis

The heroes who have occasionally taken action in the novels of Ioanna Karystianis belong to a multifaceted group that represents the most diverse life attitudes, being able to capture a particularly wide range of choices, characters and attitudes. Ready to throw themselves into the most unexpected paths, willing to face destruction, theirs and others, left in the hands of a cruel fate, actuated by a force beyond their will, to drag them into blind conflict and finally to annihilation, the heroes of Karystiani are often driven to the limits of their individual existence, dragging along with them a society wounded in a thousand places, or testing an outside world which is unable to muster any protective brake on their terrible shock. And on the other hand, Karystiani has sketched and crafted protagonists who look like benevolent spirits, who open redemptive passages in the void and panic or who release waves of spaciousness and tolerance, embracing and including in their rushing current even those who hesitate or fear to adopt their determination and strength to rise above the innumerable adversities of everyday life.

Michalis Tsioulis, whom we follow at the age of 53 (with the present tense of the narration in 2005) in Karystiani’s new novel, which has just been released under the title “Fine letters” by Kastaniotis publications, is in no way moving towards dissolution and annihilation, without, however, at the same time being a source of inexhaustible optimism and encouragement. Michalis is a gray, somewhat hesitant and definitely melancholic hero, who has carefully kept himself in the shadow of everything: in the shadow of his brother, who follows a career as a diplomat and has infinite ambitions (although they remain until the end with clipped wings), in shadow of his teacher father, who always considers him an indifferent “rest”, in the shadow of his uncle Fontas, who stole the family’s pain and glory with his death in the Civil War.

The only thing that Michalis manages to do is to save his memory, utilizing from its reserves not only the great and the big, but also the “fine print”, the unseen details, which despite their finite size or even their insignificance are able to add up a capital, a precious bequest, precisely because of its missing (except precious for its low-voiced humanity) weight.

What is this weight? But, Michael’s ability to give meaning and content to his aimless, even untimely life, which is kept afloat by nothing, which can discover a hidden spark in the embers of the scraps that threaten him every now and then. Alternating the first-person, subjective narration with the third-person, objective narration, Karystiani carefully gathers the scraps of Michalis to transform the transitory into permanent and the meaningless into essential. Michalis loves flying and airplanes, like his brother Kimon, but he studies aircraft engineering and works for life in the Greek Aviation Industry. And if he will never travel to the places he reads about in books and on the internet, and if he will never fly like his brother, their names and images are enough for him, his dreams are enough and left over for him to feel the joy of flight and journey in the ethers, to transform his earthly, chthonic walk into a step of saving transcendence.

Inventing catalogs with types of civil and military planes, with well-known and lesser-known war events, with ordinary but also exotic, almost mythical locations or with micro-information about the mechanical parts of the aircraft and their operation, Karystiani deftly unfolds the field in which they move both reality and Michael’s daydreams. And next to her catalogs, the author reopens a chain of political and historical events on the Greek and international scene. The international context is based on the hero’s readings and online browsing, which is like flipping through an encyclopedia, but with a flipping that offers him an inner breath and view. The Greek political events again show the rough passage of Michalis from the whole of post-war and post-political history: what he lived, once again, in the shadows and on the margins, what made him a “miniature man”, who, however, did not stop for a moment to he experiences, even in absolute inactivity, the big picture, being a tiny digit of it. After all, Michalis’s loves also represent a small number: small, short-lived, fleeting, indifferent, fueled anew by an over-substitute imagination, as well as by his broken retroactive memory, which confuses faces and eras without actually harming his memories , despite his fear at some stage of their possible loss.

Karystiani’s novel is not generally afraid of their losses and paraphernalia. But he knows not only not to allow us to feel repulsed on their behalf, but also to show us how to draw from them ways to continue our journey at least partially unscathed – if not strengthened with the weapon of an optimistic pessimism for the present and for the future. The author has also built for the “Fine letters” a robust and warmly expressive language, which, without relying on games and the display of its wealth, wins our attention and secures our emotion thanks to its precision, ingenuity and depth of penetration. in the unexplored aspects of the ego.

RES-EMP

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