New Life

The story of Serenity starts in July 1923, when a faction of refugees from Phocis (who may have origin in the Asia Minor) like many other displaced during the Great War (1914-1918) or during the population exchange in the aftermath of Greco-Turkish War (1919-1922), is allowed to settle in Anavyssos – a barren, desolate and rugged, untilled coastal land, close to the salt pans in the Saronic Gulf. Initially afraid of the wilderness and full of doubts and fear about their new home, the refugees finally settle with the allotted lands and build their shacks with the government help. However, the locals from the surrounding do not favour their presence and are determined to create trouble for them if necessary.

Among the refugees are Dimitris Venis and Irini–who once belonged to the nobility, and is unhappy and unsatisfied with their status, is filled with sullenness all the time and irked with her husband, a doctor by profession who has chosen to settle here. Another couple of Fotis and Eleni is close to the Venis family and all of them had lived closely during their stay on Aegina during the Great War. Soon after they’re allotted lands for shacks and cultivation, and as the land was famous site of excavation for buried antiquities and tombs, Fotis and Eleni, with the help of an elderly water diviner, after arduous digging come upon a buried kouros in their land. Meanwhile Fotis waits for the opportune moment so that he can bargain a good sum for the antiquity he has found, a heavy downpour and flood hits the settlement, and brings tragedy to his hopes.

Shortly Anna and Irini’s sister Maria come from Athens to join them at Anavyssos. Maria is gradually losing her eye sight and her only hope is to wait for the return of her son Angelos, who was separated from them during the war and was taken prisoner, like many relatives of the people from the settlement. Similarly, Anna, the daughter of Venis couple, is full of hope to reunite with her young lover Andreas, who was together with Angelos. The first part of the novel ends with the arrival of Andreas, and sadly with the news that Angelos is no more, but Dimitris asks him not to reveal it to Maria.

We see many lives connecting in Anavyssos – some lost family members, some are displaced from their homeland and are left with nothing but memories and hope to finally find the peace. Irini is suffused with desperate hopelessness, frustration and humiliation, making her feel estranged among her own, while Dimitris and Fotis are trying to find a purpose and riches even if it means following fascination. Dimitirs seeks the courage, or Serenity as he tells his daughter, from the biographies of Napolean and Captain Scott and is hopeful of his rose garden, and Fotis tries to make a fortune from a fish boat and trade. Andreas is burdened and traumatized with the memory of hardships and loss he had to endure, and thinks that his childhood was taken away from him, leaving him with sad experience, restlesssness and desolation only he can understand. However, Anna tries to rekindle his failing spirit and hope. They make a trip to Aegina in Fotis’s boat and find a new meaning to their shared memories and love on the island. However, with the arrival of some new faces in the settlement, things take a different turn and the brightness and vigor we feel coming in the lives of Dimitris, Andreas and Anna is shattered again in brutal and tragic sequence of events.

Serenity is a novel full of voices. As refugees struggle to harmonize and find livelihood and peace in their new home, the author carves out their natural voices from the depths of their past, aspiration and dreams and makes the texture of this new life so palpable through scenic narration, we feel the turmoil left by the war, and human sensitivities shaped by this unprecedented new challenge. The composite nature of the text welcomes humans as well as the nature as a force in this new life. For instance, even salt pyramids are free to observe the Phocians and their new rituals. At moments, it looks like a connection between humans and the Earth is finding a language through the novel. Also, the author takes the liberty of coming face to face with the readers – and this makes the work more personal for both him and us – in an enigmatic¹ tone.

1.       A sky-blue line above the dust of the earth, containing trees and tombs, and flashes of lightning that are drawn, erased and plunged into the sea, and beyond everything the silence, the final boundary of the world–what, I wonder, is the fate of the world? Oh reader, I am trying to tell the fate of a few people; I would like to tell of the bones the sea will cover and whiten after numberless years. And I know nothing more worthy of ridding man of the bitterness of uncertainty than the silence and certainty of the stars.

The primordial feelings and faith surrounding one’s homeland; hope and desire to endure the new existence; characters trying to give new meaning to their lives since their past aspirations have been left in disorder and are now just an unrealized dreams: these are some of the ideas in the novel. And, author is so caring of his characters that he even takes a step forward to tell their agony, aspirations or mere visions, as if rescuing their voices, outside the quotations, and in bright pieces in between the text, and they prove to be burst of sensitive experience and existential surge of emotions^{2, 3} with poetic charm and depth.

2.       How fine it would be if everything were so futile that people would not even try to do anything! And so they would sit plunged in certainty, their limbs at rest, feeling no pain… Many things seemed beautiful in this world, but how could she know? She and all others of her position only knew what was useful.

3.       You can get used to anything. You can become used to looking inside yourself and seeing how naked and desolate it is, as if you are the first on the earth and beginning the history of mankind, now and alone. You become used to believing in nothing, not dreaming, denuded of everything that reconciles us with people and life. You become used to destroying yourself and others, and everything inside you becoming silent – Fear, imagination, pity. Everything, therefore, is simply a matter of degree: until you fall. Thus you can grow used to this, too: telling stories to a mother every day about a child who will not return.

We feel the terrain of the coastal land and also the terrain of human feelings. Nothing escapes the author’s vision of accommodating all the elements of survival, interdependence and interactions between all forces and elements of nature and humans. The monotony of existence and hope to reconcile to everything to find a new meaning of life; the melancholy of happiness and anguish to hear a piece of good news; clinging on the hope and abyss between the old and new lives – these intersperse in the story.

The central theme of Serenity⁴ is the force of aspiration and peace found through fascination, through voyage, accomplishments, existence and hope.

4.       Serenity! In the calm, the tumult, in the water that relaxes as it forms a cloud, in the clouds that clash during the storm and try to cast out their water and find peace, in the passions of people who struggle and fight, in the people who suffer because they were not destined to do anything, in the bodies that struggle for love, in the stars that tumble down at night, in the earth that turns, in dreams and deeds, in everything the search for a lost balance, a ceaseless recomposition.

Set in the aftermath of Greco-Turkish War, Serenity is a representative work dealing with the crisis left in the wake of the war and displacement. A humane, evocative and sensitive exploration of refugees, the novel is a classic text to understand and feel closely not only the suffering left by the war but also the aspiration to new life and adaptation.

Author: Ilias Venezis

Translator: Joshua Barley

Publisher: Aiora Press

Author's Photo Credit: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elias_Venezis

Review Copy Courtesy: Aiora Press