Three novels written over a period of 20 years: and the same hero…
Since the Portrait missed very early its chance to be read by the narrow community of intellectuals and the press, and so lost access to the larger public, the author, A.M., proceeded to a next step, that of cutting the Gordian knot: Re-reading his own novel, correcting lacunae in content and maladroitness in style, editing from the very beginning whole parts of it. This is exactly what he did. For some months. And then one day, after almost a year on this painful job, he realized with some relief indeed, that he was on his way to a new (and probably more) novel(s).
So he changed again his mind and decided to cut the Gordian knot once and for all: by pillaging his own work, his Portrait of a Sad Young Man in a Train. Now with the clear intention to work out the best parts of it (in many cases that meant whole chapters) into the new long narrative he already had sketched in his mind and on his notes. His new project would evolve around a distinctive main character, a symbol of contemporary intellectuals' incompetence to deal with the new realities of globalization: Benjamin Sanidopoulos, a middle-aged intellectual, ex-leftist (still with vivid memories of May '68), passionate in his feelings, betrayed by women 's lust for power, still idealist in his social vision but with no real hope for the future, overwhelmed, if not defeated, by the invasion of commercial / life-style / mass culture barbarism.
Thus the Sanidopoulos Trilogy is solidly based on the (unnoticed in its time) Portrait. The author, after publishing the second volume in the series, took out Portrait from the official list of his works. Probably he wished to cut the umbilical code with a period of his creative life that caused pain and disappointment. A bibliographical detail here: there exists no Trilogy in the proper meaning of the word. Nowhere in the novels it is stated that they are part of a larger composition. But in the course of time people came to recognize the one protagonist, the one style, the one concept. Some reviewers called the books a Trilogy – and people with humor even began calling Maragkopoulos Sanidopoulos, after his hero!
So he changed again his mind and decided to cut the Gordian knot once and for all: by pillaging his own work, his Portrait of a Sad Young Man in a Train. Now with the clear intention to work out the best parts of it (in many cases that meant whole chapters) into the new long narrative he already had sketched in his mind and on his notes. His new project would evolve around a distinctive main character, a symbol of contemporary intellectuals' incompetence to deal with the new realities of globalization: Benjamin Sanidopoulos, a middle-aged intellectual, ex-leftist (still with vivid memories of May '68), passionate in his feelings, betrayed by women 's lust for power, still idealist in his social vision but with no real hope for the future, overwhelmed, if not defeated, by the invasion of commercial / life-style / mass culture barbarism.
Thus the Sanidopoulos Trilogy is solidly based on the (unnoticed in its time) Portrait. The author, after publishing the second volume in the series, took out Portrait from the official list of his works. Probably he wished to cut the umbilical code with a period of his creative life that caused pain and disappointment. A bibliographical detail here: there exists no Trilogy in the proper meaning of the word. Nowhere in the novels it is stated that they are part of a larger composition. But in the course of time people came to recognize the one protagonist, the one style, the one concept. Some reviewers called the books a Trilogy – and people with humor even began calling Maragkopoulos Sanidopoulos, after his hero!
I. The Beautiful days of Benjamin Sanidopoulos
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| A sample poem from the book |
The above film, Sail on is a short clip that tries to show the prism through which terrorism is understood and experienced in the Western world. The next video, The Dream…, shows another aspect of the same problem: how some people (in this case the Greeks) feel betrayed after Second World War and look forward to a retaliation – whatever that may imply in today's social and cultural conjuncture… In fact it implies a lot. This is the real subject of A.M.'s novel Obsession with Spring (see below).
II. Love, Gardens, Ingratitude
(2002)
The plot: it covers the story of seven different (in age, status and character) women. Four of them are typical examples of executive managers (an amalgam of cosmopolitan, intellectual and businesswoman) the sophisticated kind that lives and thrives in the big European cities.
The main character of the book, a young intellectual of about thirty years old (journalist by profession and poet by ambition), Benjamin Sanidopoulos, seems to have had in the past an intense emotional affair with these four ladies. Sanidopoulos meets three other women in a later (and much shorter) period of time: when he decides to quit his job at his newspaper and leave the country for a one year self-exile in France. The acquaintance with these women manifests itself as a revelation for the protagonist; for the first time in his life, he has the feeling that he met some remarkable people; women that up to then he never paid attention for, who have nothing to do with shallow intellectualism and bland business, women who, according to him, offer the elixir of life.
The picture of the main character, of the seven women and of the relationship between them is a part of a broader picture: contemporary Greece from just after the fall of the junta in 1974 and up to the nineties. In a parallel line with this central story develops that of Sanidopoulos' family, a typical petit-bourgeois Greek family, the core of today's Greek society.
Sanidopoulos, just before leaving France, arranges a meeting, with the first four women, at the National Garden in Athens. The appointment for all of them is fixed at the same time of the day. By bringing all of them together in a mysterious ritual of sexual and emotional intercourse he tries to figure out what went wrong in his relationship to them, to women in general. There, one of them, whom the hero accuses of misdemeanors against him, kills herself by accident. Sanidopoulos leaves afterwards alone for a long meditative walk wishing to reach Sounion, the temple of Apollo. But he arrives at being gravely injured by a car that falls over him the moment he tries to cross the road and get nearer to the sea front.
We learn the rest of the story by the writer of the book who, twenty years after that incident, meets two of the late three women of Sanidopoulos. They are living under the same roof in a kind of peculiar sisterhood and one of them has a son, 20 years old, named Benjamin after Sanidopoulos…
The narrative style:
We learn the story, at least the larger part of it, through the attempt of Sanidopoulos to write an autobiography of his thirty years of life. He begins the narration as a monologue but in the course he turns to the third person so that the narration takes more and more the form of a fiction novel. Some correspondence in the appendix, at the end of the book, explains the reasons for that. The writer of the book himself, reflects in his turn on Sanidopoulos's autobiography and criticizes it in five instances all under the same heading «Fruitless Life».
The book contains many references to the Greek intellectual life of the last fifty years, to painting, writing, music etc. But in most cases one has to be quite aware of the reference to recognize its origin. For example, the last chapter of Sanidopoulos's autobiography (which is written without punctuation, demanding a breathless reading) brings to mind the tempo of the popular oriental dance of zeimbekiko, while in another case (chapter «Fragmenta Feminarum Graecarum») some excerpts from the Apocalypse of Saint John and other archetypal texts are inserted to highlight particular aspects of the narrative.
The concept:
The text taken as a whole is an allegory of the contemporary world of cheap imitation and simulation of the authentic. For this reason realism is smoothly diffused into the imaginary and the magical: the main idea being to picture the multiple possibilities presented to all people to change the course of their impoverished life. Benjamin is in fact a modern saint in a world that has lost its humanist center, its belief to ethical, political and social visions. Being unable to apply his humanist visions to reality, experiencing the loss of Sacred in everyday life he stages improvised rituals which, even if they concern only his intimate believers, that is the few women of his past life, they mean something to his dignity.
| A sample chapter from the book |
| A critical review |
III. Obsession with Spring
(2006, 2nd ed. 2009)
The novel is a political allegory that tries to
explore the unfamiliar cohabitation of Democracy and Terrorism in the
contemporary world. Focusing on Greece as his case study the author
portrays in sharp strokes the mentality of a people brought up in
constant anger, through a fifty years social unrest, and the
terrible dilemmas that have to face those who approach the borders of
terrorism.
THE PLOT
Two close friends, in their fifties, the first one an activist for non-governmental organizations, the other a former member of extreme leftist groups, meet in Athens after the first returns from ten years of self imposed exile in Europe. It’s high summer in the year 2000, and they decide to spend some days in the islands together with their much younger girlfriends Flora (twenty five) and Maria (thirty something). The island they visit, and more particularly, the place where they settle for their holidays (Chora), is dominated by a strange community isolated from the rest of the country and the world geographically, financially, socially, politically, and culturally.
The inhabitants live by the rules of a peculiar system of direct democracy: shops open near midnight and close in the early morning, TV sets are switched off, open readings of books and political discussions in the Women ’s Co-operative (a soviet like commune) constitute their favorite entertainment, while their general attitude to the tourists is arrogant and even hostile at times.
At first the four friends are fascinated by what seems to them a lonely Utopia kept alive by political visions of a remote past that believed blindly in the triumph of communism. This is mostly the case for Sanidopoulos, the activist whose heart beats again to the rebellious tempo of his youth, of May ’68 in Paris. He is enchanted by the recognized leader of this community, the temptress Flora, who continues in her sixties to be as sexual and earthy as in her thirties. The reader discovers that both of them share something in common: they have inspired the heroes of two novels. Flora has been the heroine of a book by a famous Greek author in the sixties, while Sanidopoulos has been the hero in a book written by Marangopoulos himself! Apart from that superficial affinity, what really brings these two people together is their common anger over social injustice, their obsession with spring, that is the Marxist obsession not just to interpret but also to change the world...
The passionate love that grows between them soon brings other people on the scene like the old teacher Dimitris Bogas, a phlegmatic leftist, and the very young Stella who becomes a friend to the young Flora and Maria. The story gradually takes the form of a thriller: as the days of summer pass by, the company of the four Athenian friends finds itself actively involved in the weird circumstances that emerge slowly but surely in that part of the island: a fire in the mountains; a TV crew thrown to the sea by nervous agitators; stories about past political vendettas which seem still to prevail among the locals; growing suspicions about the secret subversive role of the elder Flora; other suspicions that some people here are “authorized” by an unwritten moral agreement to take the law into their own hands. And, as we reach the end, a terrorist act: a government minister, a doctor managing the local hospital, a monk at the head of the local monastery, their security guards as well as the innocent Stella all left dead after a bomb attack. The repercussions reverberate, no character is left unchanged. With this explosion the narrative winds the reader into a whirlwind of unexpected turns.
THE PLOT
Two close friends, in their fifties, the first one an activist for non-governmental organizations, the other a former member of extreme leftist groups, meet in Athens after the first returns from ten years of self imposed exile in Europe. It’s high summer in the year 2000, and they decide to spend some days in the islands together with their much younger girlfriends Flora (twenty five) and Maria (thirty something). The island they visit, and more particularly, the place where they settle for their holidays (Chora), is dominated by a strange community isolated from the rest of the country and the world geographically, financially, socially, politically, and culturally.
The inhabitants live by the rules of a peculiar system of direct democracy: shops open near midnight and close in the early morning, TV sets are switched off, open readings of books and political discussions in the Women ’s Co-operative (a soviet like commune) constitute their favorite entertainment, while their general attitude to the tourists is arrogant and even hostile at times.
At first the four friends are fascinated by what seems to them a lonely Utopia kept alive by political visions of a remote past that believed blindly in the triumph of communism. This is mostly the case for Sanidopoulos, the activist whose heart beats again to the rebellious tempo of his youth, of May ’68 in Paris. He is enchanted by the recognized leader of this community, the temptress Flora, who continues in her sixties to be as sexual and earthy as in her thirties. The reader discovers that both of them share something in common: they have inspired the heroes of two novels. Flora has been the heroine of a book by a famous Greek author in the sixties, while Sanidopoulos has been the hero in a book written by Marangopoulos himself! Apart from that superficial affinity, what really brings these two people together is their common anger over social injustice, their obsession with spring, that is the Marxist obsession not just to interpret but also to change the world...
The passionate love that grows between them soon brings other people on the scene like the old teacher Dimitris Bogas, a phlegmatic leftist, and the very young Stella who becomes a friend to the young Flora and Maria. The story gradually takes the form of a thriller: as the days of summer pass by, the company of the four Athenian friends finds itself actively involved in the weird circumstances that emerge slowly but surely in that part of the island: a fire in the mountains; a TV crew thrown to the sea by nervous agitators; stories about past political vendettas which seem still to prevail among the locals; growing suspicions about the secret subversive role of the elder Flora; other suspicions that some people here are “authorized” by an unwritten moral agreement to take the law into their own hands. And, as we reach the end, a terrorist act: a government minister, a doctor managing the local hospital, a monk at the head of the local monastery, their security guards as well as the innocent Stella all left dead after a bomb attack. The repercussions reverberate, no character is left unchanged. With this explosion the narrative winds the reader into a whirlwind of unexpected turns.
| A sample chapter from the book |
