Book Review

In The Odyssey, Odysseus tricks the cyclops, Polyphemus, by lying when asked his name— Odysseus says, “My name is nobody . . . .” So after being wounded, when his fellow cyclops come to his aid and ask who hurt him, Polyphemus responds, “Nobody hurt me.”

This anonymity and renouncing of a name gives Odysseus power and so too does it lend a kind of complicated power to the unnamed narrator of Natalie Bakopoulos’ third novel, Archipelago. The novel begins in medias res, on a ferry ride to a translator’s conference along the Dalmatian Coast of Croatia where the narrator begins work on a new project. She has left the states with no tethers or planned timeline for return. And after reuniting with Luka, an old friend who calls her Natalia, the name of a character he’d written based on her, she wonders,

Was I Natalia in the navy dress? I did not deny it, I did not correct him; I had allowed for the merging of character and self and maybe I’d even craved it. Luka had translated how he saw me, a version of me that belonged to me but also did not. A version that belonged to him. I sat with this a moment. A version that belonged to him. No. That wasn’t quite right.

Unlike Odysseus, the unnamed narrator refutes deception; she is interested in the very core of truth and meaning, of identity, of self, and sense of place. It is the hunger for understanding and contemplation that drives this novel forward and will prove infinitely rewarding for any reader. The narrator confronts issues of nationalism and the need for the porosity of borders as she grapples with her own fractured identity as a Greek American woman at the precipice of middle age. She contemplates how she “. . . had been conditioned to think that menopause would be an end, but [rather] it was a reset. A beginning of a story that starts in the middle.” In this work, Bakopoulos urges us to search for such complicated truths.

At the conclusion of the conference, ‘Natalia’ rents a small apartment to extend her stay in Croatia and to pursue a relationship with Luka. Here, time becomes a blurry material, much like borders, bodies, and language as the narrator spends her days swimming in the sea. Often she emerges from a swim feeling like she’d “. . . done an open-water swim, from one island to the next, and now stood looking out across the sea.” Water becomes a crucial space in this novel, as it is the sea which forms the fluid setting and creates the archipelagos which the narrator navigates. She states, “I could really see the Mediterranean as an interior sea, a sea of kinship, surrounded by the lands that share its name. In this way its borders erase. This is not a vast sea but an intimate one.”

It is a deep desire for interconnectedness, both within the self and with those around her, that our narrator seeks. And it is water that becomes a vehicle for that journey, “that elusive border between land and sea.” The narrator frequently returns to the image of ancient rivers flowing below Athens, however since learning about them she “. . . had been unable to walk through the neighborhood behind the ancient stadium without wondering what ran beneath [her] feet. And somewhere else [she’d] read that those who grew up swimming in rivers can feel those rivers in the sea when they swim.” This narrator is pursuing a sense of knowing one’s self, not found in taking on a false or alternate name, but by removing it and finding a true one, or several.

The span of time spent in Croatia is punctuated by interactions with Luka and Natalia’s daily swims. There is no singular epiphanic moment, but rather a slow and steady unraveling as the narrator realizes her need to return to Greece. She experiences brief moments of illusion, the fleeting images of menacing men in the periphery, at points thinking she sees her younger self walking down the street. These feelings come as a kind of haunting and remembering of past selves. Much like the work of translating a novel without knowing its ending, her life seems to be read and translated in live time. We come to see Luka as an unlikely Calypso, though in this story the hero releases herself from the island.

It is not until the final section that the narrator decides to leave and return to Greece. While the novel is deeply entangled with The Odyssey, it is not a retelling but rather a building upon, a contorted echo heard from the far end of a long cave. A cave called Xenitia or “otherness in a foreign land.” The narrator goes on, speaking of Greek folk music,

I could feel all my languages and cultures mixing about inside me, and somehow this song seemed to hold it all in. The songs were often about the songs, as they were in Greek rebetika: I am singing about the pain I sing about. The Greek verb “to feel pain” is not in the passive voice but active: “I hurt,” or even, “I care for.”

The novel is populated with rich sections such as this where the narrator seems to speak about the act of writing itself—a meta-narrative upon a meta-narrative and a far more accurate depiction of the process by which we write, read, and sing through our multiplicity of selves. If The Odyssey is about arrival to Ithaca, Archipelago is about arriving at an understanding of what Ithaca or ‘these Ithacas’ might possibly be as well as who we must become to arrive there.

Near the novel’s end, the narrator makes plans to visit the ruins of the oracle of the dead, she states,

to head to the town of Mesopotamos—“between rivers”—to visit the ruins of the oracle of the dead, where people once came, first to cleanse themselves and then to enter underground tunnels where they would see the shadowy shapes of the underworld. Mythologies tended to erase the modern-day world from its landscape, but I was interested particularly in the way they coexisted. Those sorrowful waters resounding on the rocks.

Sorrow keeps breaking in.

This almost certainly harkens back to the Oracle of Delphi’s pronouncement “Know thyself . . .”, a pronouncement which seems to saturate every page of the novel. Yet, despite this seemingly fitting ending, the narrator never makes it to the oracle, rather forgets the need to arrive there. Instead, she reaches a beach near her home that exists quite literally between a river and the sea.

It is here that the narrator comes to feel the rivers that flow beneath her life and the borders they create. She defines her Ithacas as an ever-shifting rift, leaving us “With the understanding that this seam is the only self and it is like the seashore, never fixed and never the same.”