In Gozis, personal memory meets the collective, urban culture merges with popular culture, the sublime and the mundane coexist. Otherwise the tone becomes mocking and the texts satire social practices, human types and behaviors. The unnecessary means of expression and the pretended “innocence” of Tula’s style are coordinated with the dramatic moments of harsh everyday life, managing to evoke warmth and emotion. Melissa Stoili returns, mixing her ingredients correctly again, but, this time, grafting her bittersweet, wisely structured atmospheric, often magical and paradoxical stories into the multicultural history of Thessaloniki.
Twenty-two texts, written between 2013 and 2022, full of strange protagonists and paradoxical incidents, are included in the new collection by Giorgos Gozis with the subtitle “fairy-tale collision of narratives and short stories” — in the foreground, a humorous depiction of the mistress of the author’s youth; in the background, the grotesque character of post-political Greece.
“I am struggling with the experience” declares the author in his preface and, in the short story “Antiparochi”, the narrator skilfully goes in and out of his childhood memories in front of the demolished father. Nostalgia in the little “sad notes” often emerges from the gaze of a walker/narrator recalling faces and things of a lost world.
The personal memory meets the collective, the urban culture is absorbed by the popular, the sublime and the mundane coexist. Otherwise the tone becomes satirical, and the texts satire social practices, human types and behaviors.
Hence the heroic resistance of a narrator who insists on traditional letter correspondence (“Par Avion”), the narrator’s absolute dependence on electronic communication (“Hamil Batar”) and the merchant who argues why he does not cut receipts (“First comes the soul and then the hui”). As for the bold criticism of the cultural field of the misty co-capital (“Infinite vertical paraphrasing”), it also applies well to the Attic sky of the capital.
As can be seen from the pseudo-essay text dedicated to Panagiotis Goutas, the anniversary short story for 1821 and also the longest “chorus” of the collection (“I have a sister”), Gozis is attracted by the parodic style. Moving comfortably across the boundaries of genres (from the vignette and the essay to the short story), the author “has fun” constantly transforming his language. Mimicking style, social and local idioms, he leaves himself to his metaphorical associations as he unfolds his anecdotal oestrus.
In the experienced writing of Gozis, well-digested echoes of the long tradition of the Thessaloniki short story are always heard, and here, more clearly, the sharp tone of Tolis Kazantzis from the unfairly forgotten Disasters (1994).
After stirring of taste memory in And speaking of… eat (Kichli, 2015), Melissa Stoili returns mixing her ingredients right again, but, this time, grafting her bittersweet, wisely structured (progressive climax, twist or discharge), atmospheric, often magical and paradoxical stories into multicultural history of Thessaloniki.
The narrative sensitive to internal vibrations remains subtle throughout. The bleak theme is offset by tender irony, humor and the frequent diversion of everyday life into the fantastical, as in “TIF Days”, where people are hurled from swings and fall onto passers-by.
If time stretches from the First World War to the turn of the century, the place remains everywhere the damp city and its wider area. Here, outcasts of life and playthings of History drag their steps in refugee huts and suffocating shelters, confront memories and personal traumas, experience harsh trials and painful defeats; like the childless woman in the muddy streets of Armenia (“The Sorrowful Princess Soraya”) , Skevi who was sold by her gyrologist father to an innkeeper (“The lucky one”) and the tuberculous Morpho who, forgotten by her family in the asylum of Asvestochori, ended up a prostitute (“Vardari region – transaction”) in a perhaps fictional enlargement of a well-known archival photograph (“TheVardarDistrict/Bargaining”) from the area of… “Agios Vardarios”, as Ioannou would say.
A historical accurate reference or a few dialectical words is enough, and the collective memory is activated. The story surrounding the sealed well in the Hirsch settlement (“The Gold Rush”) and the ghost of the handgunman who bid farewell to the first train to Auschwitz (“At the Train Station”) recall the tragic history of the town’s Jews, the group paranoia in “Teras” obliquely comments on the story of Sheikh Shu’s Dragon, the improbable stories of the bathhouse Alalaou, embroidered on folk novels and the pamphlet of Alexander the Great, pour into the era of the earthquakes of 1978 (“Phoenix Baths”), and a director , who is filming a documentary about “Apocalypse” in the city, will experience the modern post-apocalyptic setting of the JETOIL explosions, together with his insane father in Kalochori in 1986 (“And there was a war in the sky”).
However, great history is also encountered by personal wrecks, such as the souvenirs of the love of the central character in “Red Florinis Peppers”, which finally rest at the bottom together with the historical wrecks of Thermaikos.
Pleasant surprise the first prose appearance of Giorgos Toulas, who has been a protagonist for years in the cultural life of the city by publishing the magazine PARALLAXI. In most of the short stories in the collection Distant neighborhoods the life-broken lonely heroes quietly walk their own personal Golgothas in the working-class neighborhoods of the city. A father is driven to drink after the death of his cancer-stricken son (“Epine”), a pensioner meets a tragic death immediately after her retirement (“Oristikon”), a Polish woman and a lonely Greek will become close for a while, in her longest short story collection (“In capital letters”).
And because there is no end to “the passions and miseries of the world”, the “brutal years of the crisis”, leaving their traces everywhere in the city, intensify the feeling of deep human loneliness. Thus, the single mother of a prisoner hosts refugees in her inn pilot (“Far Neighbors”) and long before Christmas a fired father buys presents for his children (“Stardust”). The unnecessary expressive means and the pretended “innocence” of the style are coordinated with the dramatic moments of hard everyday life, managing to evoke warmth and emotion. Otherwise, just the respectful distance of the narrator who records like a documentary lens is enough: fragments of a dialogue in the folk, a girl buys a “formal” skirt and “fades out” in the streets with closed shops (“The Girl with the Skirt”).