Orthokostá Read Free

accuse Valtinos of equating understanding with excusing miss the book’s point, which is to reveal the intricate universe into which all these people moved and to immerse us in it. On that score,
Orthokostá
is an unmitigated success.
    Does its unrelenting focus on this complex reality make
Orthokostá
an amoral account? Quite the opposite. I would argue instead that it is deeply moral. Although no attempt is made to apportion responsibility for the atrocities, several stories contain elements of a “moral economy” shared by most narrators, one that privileges an understanding of individual responsibility embedded in its context, as opposed to a general and abstract judgment. In this view, most people are seen as subject to their own passions and the prevailing social norms, victims of the terrible situation in which they found themselves. It is often hard to blame them, for they are hardly masters of their own volition. Nor, obviously, can they be praised. Yet at the same time certain actions are singled out, either positively or negatively: positively, when people transcend their limitations to performunexpected good deeds (“He wasn’t a die-hard Communist. He would cover for our fellow villagers.”); negatively, when individuals transcend them in the opposite direction to commit random or excess violence, as do militiamen such as the Galaxýdis brothers and Kóstas Kotrótsos, who were trigger-happy, looters, “unprincipled drifter[s],” or simply “animal[s],” or the old man who helped the militiamen set a house on fire:
    And on their way up to the square old Yiánnis Prásinos says, Haven’t you set it ablaze yet? And he took out his flint lighter. They were going to burn it down one way or another. But old Yiánnis, he gave them his lighter. He tossed it to them from his bench. May God forgive him.
    Orthokostá
may be read as an account of the Greek Civil War as it was experienced in the villages of Kynouria: it is a fascinating and enlightening one. But it may also be read much more broadly, as an account of the human experience in the midst of extraordinarily harsh circumstances. This latter reading resonates powerfully with journalistic reports from contemporary civil wars and also with Thucydides’ description of civil strife in the earlier Peloponnesian War: “Human nature, always ready to offend even where laws exist, showed itself proudly in its true colours, as something incapable of controlling passion, insubordinate to the idea of justice, the enemy to anything superior to itself.”
    Orthokostá’
s narrators reassert, via Valtinos, Thucydides’ perspective when they offer observations and reflections that encapsulate everlasting, almost biblical, truths:
    It was God’s wrath, all that, there’s nothing else you can say.
    And may all that never happen again.

INTRODUCTION
Stavros Deligiorgis
    Notre histoire est noble et tragique
    Comme le masque d’un tyran.
    â€”Guillaume Apollinaire, “Cors de chasse,”
Alcools
(1913)
    When Thanassis Valtinos first began writing, the literary climate in Greece was not particularly auspicious for fiction. Poetry was the dominant medium of expression, and formidable writers like George Seferis, Odysseas Elytis, Andreas Embirikos, and Yannis Ritsos were in the forefront, giving Greek poetry both national and international acclaim. The appearance in 1963 of Valtinos’s novel
Η κάθοδος των εννιά
(The Descent of the Nine), however, set the pace for new forms of expression in prose fiction that had no precedent in terms of immediacy, terseness, and use of controversial subject matter—with the possible exception of the memoirs of the nineteenth-century general Ioannis Makrygiannis (published in 1907). Among Valtinos’s contemporaries few had ventured to broach the occulted subject of the 1947–49 Greek Civil War