The Green ShoreIf you can’t, as a writer, delineate a relationship in a single sentence, then you can’t do it if you take three hundred lines. When Natalie Bakopoulos in The Green Shore says that young Anna looks up to her married lover Evan, about 20 years her senior, as if he were a movie star, then you understand a highly complex relationship in a single stroke of the writer’s pen.

And when she adds that Anna could be forgiven for feeling that way but that Evan could not be forgiven for allowing it, you grasp that no relationship takes place in a vacuum but echoes through an extended web of family and friends.

I’m being disingenuous by implying the writer can do it in one sentence. Yes, the one-sentence stroke has to be there or I’m not willing to read the book. It’s like the most skilled of dancers being able to turn rapidly but still stop on a dime, stopping faster than you can see her stop, not an ounce of energy wasted in superfluous forward momentum. But that sentence exists in a fluid continuum that comprises the writer’s style.

For gifted debut novelist Natalie Bakopoulos in The Green Shore, the novel is a polis. It’s Athens and its politics in the late 60’s and early 70’s under the rule of a fascist junta. It’s women being arrested on the street because their skirts are too short or poets tortured on account of their verses. It’s the stage set of the neighborhoods of Athens, where roofs are not peaked like mine because there is no snow, where some of the best scenes in a novel can take place on the roofs of houses which serve as outdoor rooms, and where spiral staircases can take you from the roof to the garden where the jasmine and cigarette smoke scents the Mediterranean night. It’s where characters don’t just inhabit their houses but live in them while you are watching. Where you can imagine opening the front door and knowing what the house smells like and recognize that it’s the familiar beloved smell of home.

My blogger’s telescope finds it way to the families that live in those subtle houses, to widowed Irini, older daughter Sophie, who was born with an attitude, younger daughter Anna, playing, but just playing, the role of the good daughter, and son Taki who wants out and gets out, literally getting out of the novel early, for the most part, for the States. Taki prefers the green lawns and relative absence of historical context in the U.S.

He finds the thrice millennial culture of Athens with its collective identity confining. I can’t imagine wanting a collective identity either so I’m not very Greek. But I’m Greek enough to love this book. The Green Shore reminds me of the old novels on Greek themes that I read in my student days…all the Kazantzakis I could obtain.

The Green Shore is resonant with the cadences of Greek poets like George Seferis and Yannis Ritsos. Poetry haunts a troubled Athens in this story, a city where poets are recognized by sentries at street corners as if they were rock stars.

Most of the characters in The Green Shore find Athens centering as if the whole city were their house. Love can best be demonstrated by the attention the loved one receives. Natalie savors the names of the districts, the streets and shops of Athens as if they were mouth-watering pieces of baklava.

The good Jeremiah Chamberlin of our brother blog, Fiction Writer’s Review, has told me that Natalie teaches a course in the literature of exile at the University of Michigan. When the enterprising Sophie of The Green Shore has to leave Greece suddenly because the secret police have pinned her down as a distributor of revolutionary leaflets, she escapes to Paris.

I was impressed by how quickly the stasis of our lives can be overturned. Sophie intends to shower her assigned neighborhood with revolutionary leaflets at night. There’s an awesome scene where she is waiting for her boyfriend Nick on a dark deserted street. Nick doesn’t show, he’s been arrested. A solicitous young man appears out of the shadows instead and asks her what she is doing there alone.

Sophie, making excuses, says she’s had a fight with her boyfriend. The guy, mirroring Sophie, says he’s also had a fight with his girlfriend. But you can tangibly feel the mounting fear that Sophie must be feeling. In her bag are circulars against the junta that could get her imprisoned. The young man is dressed like a student, but as an impossibly classic student, like out of central casting. When Sophie tells her uncle Mikalis about the incident, he arranges for her departure for Paris within days.

She stays for six years. Natalie scatters her characters like colored pebbles over a beach. It’s a tribute to the discipline of the writer that she can pull them all together again at her conclusion.

What stays with you most about this story are its women. Sure, the guys are great too. It’s a great highlight of the book when the wayward poet Mihalis, who is Sophie’s uncle, fights back under torture, almost daring the police to hurt him.
But the women are the ones on fire in this novel. Irini, Sophie’s mother, balancing her life between three men, her revered lost husband Christos, her right wing boyfriend Dimitri, and the mysterious Andreas, who perhaps she is in love with, intrigued, because she knows nothing personal about him.

There’s Sophie’s obsession with the rakish Loukas in Paris. Loukas is with the beautiful Estrella, and it seems that the less Sophie can see of him, the more she wants him. There’s a wonderful small scene at a party in Paris where Loukas pulls Sophie onto a couch so he can touch her. Sophie assumes that Estrella hasn’t come to the party but in a moment her rival will walk into the crowded room and claim her boyfriend. And I mentioned youngest daughter Anna, whose first boyfriend, Evan, is married to family friend Eleni.

The Green Shore by Natalie Bakopoulos pubs on June 5th from Simon & Schuster. On its cover is a dish of red-dyed eggs. If you don’t get it about the eggs, then you’re not Greek. But the ceremony where they are used is depicted in the book. It’s a great scene…smashing actually, in which character is delineated by the performance of an old folk custom. The Green Shore is my prime choice for your summer read.