This week I finished Natalie Bakopoulos’ first book, The Green Shore, a novel set in Greece in the 1960s and 70s. I celebrated with a gyro on the deck at Keifer’s.
Ms. Bakopoulos came in Wednesday night for a reading, and I had a chance to sit down and talk with her at length about Greece, writing, and history (we’ve both learned most of our world history from novels). With that being said, before I began The Green Shore, my post-World War II knowledge of Greek history was feeble at best. I have therefore set myself on a track of diligent YouTube video study in order to educate myself on the finer points of Greek culture (I’ve included some links at the bottom of the blog).
The Green Shore opens with a coup d’état: it’s 1967, and the right-wing Junta, led by three officers in the Greek military, have overthrown the democratic government and established themselves as the rightful government of Greece. Backed by the USA, the Junta removed eleven articles of the Greek constitution and left the Greek people unprotected from their own government. Almost simultaneously, Greek intellectuals and politicians were imprisoned and tortured.
Ms. Bakopoulos’s book is not so much about Greece, as much as it is about a family abandoned by their own country—expatriates in their own homes. Eleni, a widowed mother of three children, struggles to come to terms with the radical change in government while her eldest daughter distributes leftist literature and her son prepares to leave for college in the States. Even under the hand of harsh rule, the microcosm of family is what really keeps the plot pushing forward. Anna, Eleni’s youngest child, falls in love with a married man twice her age. Various members of the family are imprisoned, underground health clinics are opened, and summer holidays to Hydra are rife with intrigue. The book culminates with the Athens Polytechnic School uprisings which eventually was the harbinger for the end of the dictatorship.
The best part of the book? Ms Bakopoulos’s self-portrait she drew in my copy.
George Seferis–Nobel Prize winning Greek Poet
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