Orthokostá Read Free Page B

and 1946, the appalling suffering it caused, as well as the survivors’ stories, would be hard to ignore. The book, however, communicates not long after its curtain raisers that it is as much about the many tortured tales men and women tell as it is about the drama of the disembodied voice-over experiences in its interviews and its surprising shorter but cryptic interjections. The latter, refrain-like sections—without which the book would hardly make sense—serve to reorient the reader away, momentarily, from the chronicles of the direct rightist or leftist depositions and toward a more meditative mode, in effect, toward the enigma of the aesthetic composition of the book as a whole. Shifting between elegy and anecdote, exorcism and self-exculpatory soliloquy, tableau and interview, novella and epiphany,
Orthokostá
exhibits virtuoso syncopation on the one hand and the infinite drama of the themes of the classical canon on the other.

    The book raised a furor when it first appeared in 1994 for presumably favoring one side of the conflict it portrayed over the other. Is it possible that so many of its critics read past the material in any single account (or the ironies inherent in the succession of any two) in an attempt to mine their subject matter for evidence of the author’s—Mr. Thanassis Valtinos of Main Street’s—own predilections? Was the medium of the many narratives so transparent and apparently without texture that they took it for raw, uninflected content? The numerous speaking sections of
Orthokostá
were easily construed as the evidentiary grail so many cultural historians are typically in search of. Even the possibility that the
Rashomon
effect might hint at the problematical nature of the novel, a text in the process of serial riddling, took second place to the quest for the oral histories covering the specific three terrible years that preceded the outbreak of the equally terrible Civil War in 1947. The knee-jerk reception of these critics to
Orthokostá
, personal penchants aside, might be explained in part by one legal technicality. Greece was probably the last anti-Axis country in Europe to pass legislation acknowledging that there had been resistance against the World War II Occupation powers. When the belated law was passed in 1984, both conservatives and leftists vehemently denied the other any right to claim participation in the Resistance. All this a full forty years after the withdrawal of the last German troops from Greece and only ten years before the appearance of
Orthokostá
, with its provocative polyphony.
    There have indeed been the exceptional readers who sensed an “impersonal” air to the book. They recognized Valtinos’s attraction to the slice-of-life, unsentimental folk forms that had informed a large number of his earlier works and to the unself-conscious, unschooled speech patterns of the man in the village coffeehouse, whether in Lesbos (
You Will Find My Bones Under Rain
, 1992) or in the Kastri epicenter of
Orthokostá
. Valtinos’s often nameless speakers parallel his own rather oblique presence in the larger story. Starting out as the primary listener to and transcriber of the numerous reminiscences, he comes across at first as the anthropologist’s participant observer and only gradually as the native interrogator’s amanuensis.The writer’s intermittent visibility in many of the narratives is but the self-ghosting of “Valtinos” the virtual editor who leaves no trace of his hand behind, no hint that he determined the order or form in which the book would greet or confront its readers. As the protagonists’ sex and political persuasions become progressively clearer, however, the novel appears to be concerned less with the characters’ existential predicaments, and lesser still with Greece’s role in the geo-ideological theater of the Balkans in the 1940s. Far from conflating the conventional in