Stella’s short story “Her Brother’s Keeper” appears in the Spring issue of The Muse Apprentice Magazine. Read it: http://www.muse-apprentice-guild.com/spring_2005/fiction/stella_pierides.html
All posts by Stella Pierides
Haruki Murakami’s The Wind-up Bird Chronicle
Some people think that, since life is so messy, art and literature should go about creating order. Continue reading Haruki Murakami’s The Wind-up Bird Chronicle
Poems by George Seferis
I am reading “In the Manner of G. S.” and “Thrush” both poems by George Seferis, in George Seferis: Collected Poems. Translated and edited by Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard, Princeton University Press, 1995.
We shall see what comes of it. Very soon!
Book: Beyond Madness (Co-editor)
Beyond Madness Psychosocial Interventions in Psychosis
Edited by Joseph H. Berke, Margaret Fagan, George Mak-Pearce and Stella Pierides-Müller
Paperback 1-85302-889-4, 2001, 240 pages, £17.95 $29.95
BIC: MMJT MBPK JCAF JCF
Number 7 in the Community, Culture and Change series
Publication The Accident
Read Stella’s review of Haruki Murakami’s The Wind-up Bird Chronicle in The Muse Reviews Section.
Stella’s short story “The Accident” appears in the print issue 4 of “The Quiet Feather” out now.
In the Shade of the Lemon Tree
Alexandrias 40: In the Shade of the Lemon Tree is a novel about identity. It asks how we know who we are and how events, as well as thinking, change our understanding of ourselves and of others. This theme is explored through a group of characters thrown accidentally together in Athens, Greece, in 1957, renting rooms in the house of the Pagidis.
Post World War II; post German occupation; post Civil War; and not even a century free from Ottoman rule, Greece itself has an identity problem. The refugees that fled the catastrophic 1922 war with Turkey (they comprise a fifth of the existing population) are both compounding the problem for the rest of Greece and bringing innumerable gains to it. Their traumatic past and struggle for survival, in a country that is both home and hostile to them, require extreme psychological resources of generosity and masochism, denial and ruthlessness – and above all, humour and forgiveness.
The mood, timing and rhythm of the novel reflect the survival mechanisms of the refugees as they, and their offspring, work out their lives as refugees and identities as Greeks. Tragic-comic threads run through the story, charging the atmosphere with hilarious ethnic colour, sensuality and psychological insight. Underneath this tightly woven fabric, the weight of history of Asia Minor, the Greek Civil War, collaboration and blackmail, adoption and betrayal, informs the minds and the hearts of the characters. And question their identities as Greeks, as parents, as individuals.
Sources and Related Material
Online
Alice James, 2001, ‘Memories of Anatolia: generating Greek refugee identity’, in
http://balkanologie.revues.org/index720.html
Thalia Pandiri, 2007, ‘Narratives of Loss and Survival: Greek voices from the Asia Minor Catastrophe’, in
http://www.interlitq.org/issue1/thalia_pandiri/job.php
Raymond Bonner, 1996, ‘Tales of Stolen Babies and Lost Identities; A Greek Scandal Echoes in New York’ in
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greek_Civil_War
In Print
Bruce Clark, Twice a Stranger: How Mass Expulsion Forged Modern Greece and Turkey (London: Granta Books, 2007)
Renee Hirschon, Heirs of the Greek Catastrophe: The Social Life of Asia Minor Refugees in Piraeus (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989)
Marjorie Housepian Dobkin, Smyrna 1922: The Destruction of a City (New York: Newmark Press, 1988)
Esther P Lovejoy, Certain Samaritans (New York: Macmillan, 1933).
Mark Mazower, Inside Hitler’s Greece: The Experience of Occupation,1941 – 1944 (New Haven and London: 1993)
Mark Maazower, After the War Was Over: Reconstructing the Family, Nation, and State in Greece, 1943 – 1960 (Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2000)
Leyla Neyzi, ‘Remembering Smyrna/Izmir: Shared History, Shared Trauma’ in History and Memory, Bloomington: 2008, 20:2
Arnold J Toynbee The Western Question in Greece and Turkey: A Study in the contact of civilizations (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1922)
Fiction
Louis de Bernieres, Birds without Wings (New York: Random House, 2004)
Jeffrey Eugenides, Middlesex (London: Bloomsbury, 2002)
Ernest Hemingway, ‘On the Quai at Smyrna’, in The Short Stories (New York: Scribner, 2003)
Nikos Kazantzakis, The Fratricides (London: Faber and Faber, 1974; 1967)
Nikos Kazantzakis, Christ Recrucified (London: Faber and Faber, 1962; 1954)
Dido Sotiriou, Farewell Anatolia (Athens, Greece: Kedros, 1991)
Films
Theo Angelopoulos The Weeping Meadow
Costas Ferris, Rembetiko
Elia Kazan, America America
When the Colours Sing – Background
When the Colours Sing
Background
‘When the Colours Sing’ is a novel about art, creativity and destructiveness and the ways they emerge in personal, social and political contexts. Narrated by a woman in her fiftieth year, searching for her identity through writing about her father’s (imaginary) relationship with the painter Gabriele Münter, it constructs a thread of continuity that she believes will root her in the world. In a seamless fusion of fact with fiction, the narrator’s search for identity and humanity echoes the universal search for recognition, for belonging, for approval, for love. Continue reading When the Colours Sing – Background
On Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections
The emptiness of it. The emptiness of Albert Lambert´s mind. The slow, and fast, draining, slackening, loosening of connections, of language, of life. Parkinsons, he says; Dementia. Depression. There is no healing possible. No repair. No reparation. Continue reading On Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections
He threw down the gauntlet
He threw down the gauntlet. First he paraded his finery, he touted his wares, teased them and then, he set a competition and waited. High up on his guardian throne, youthful, confident, he looked down at them and waited. Well, to be precise, he wrote while he waited. He wrote his stories, he wrote his articles, he wrote his comments. While they sweated and trembled and sharpened pencils and de-wormed computers. While they looked round with desperate intensity, lifting objects with words, pulling feelings with metaphors. While they picked their brains, and chewed their nails. While they read his shorts and his not very shorts, his books and his articles, trying to copy his style. He waited. Continue reading He threw down the gauntlet