Kapka Kassabova: Love in the land of Midas

Penguin, $34.95

Review: Pat Baskett

Take a leap of faith when you begin this novel and then hold your breath - for a long time. Almost to the end, when at last the tangle of names and relationships becomes clear.

Kassabova's fierce intellect demands that the reader follow a labyrinth of politics and relationships in which a whole clan moves in and out of three separate time frames. As if that isn't difficult enough, we're also expected to fill in lacunae so numerous that the narrative has the enigmatic quality of poetry. Has Kassabova learned too well the art of saying less to communicate more? As far as the structure of this work goes - yes, possibly. I think she could have been kinder to the reader without compromising subtlety.

In another sense - that of her writing technique - she hasn't yet learned the lesson well enough because she sometimes gets carried away, takes an image too far, tells too much. Pity, because the language is often superb in a way that only poets have with prose.

I liked images such as this: "The tight-lipped houses watched her." Whereas "The parasite of irritation settled inside her mood" seems overdone.

Here's the storyline: Theo is an Australian doctoral student doing research for his thesis in Greece and visiting relatives there. The year is 1998. Veronique is French, wealthy, dissolute, and grieving for her father who died while trying to trace his own father, Pascal, who disappeared mysteriously in Greece in 1967. Theo meets Veronique in Thessaloniki ...

Two generations earlier, Pascal, a French journalist, goes to Greece to cover the civil war that followed the end of the Second World War. He encounters Daphne, a guerrilla fighter in the Democratic Army of Greece who loses her entire family in the war. She is the novel's most successful character and her austere image overshadows both the vapid Veronique and Theo, who appears as little more than the peg on which the whole plot hangs.

Moving between the story's different time slots is a character called Michel Franchitti, whose sole purpose is to link the disparate people and events. He, along with Veronique's father, is one of the book's problems. The complexity of the plot appears to require them but its difficult to keep track of who is who and what happened when.

Kassabova's research (see her acknowledgements and author's note that the book opens with) and her skill give us a convincing picture of the civil war. She is grateful, she writes, for being born in Bulgaria and for the gifts of tragedy and paradox, and these are gifts indeed.

This is an intensely European work. We feel the continent creaking with grief, its conflicts, loves, hates, the way the people are as old as the stones on the craggy Greek cliffs, and how the young are swallowed up by tradition and their own histories. Despite its difficulties and its overwriting, it is a rewarding read. I look forward to Kassabova's next.