2023-06-23 15:23:30
DIMITRA KOLLIAKOU
Turbulence
ed. Pataki, p. 256
Ariadni, a Greek writer who has lived in Paris for years and works in public education, visits a psychiatrist every Friday. The primary trauma seems to be the loss of the father, compounded by a sense of prolonged exile. The experience of alienation becomes even more painful when the coronavirus pandemic breaks out. The heroine of Dimitra Kolliakou endures the traumatic experience of the lockdowns confined in Paris. The virus of Chinese origin reminds her of a recent trip to China, where she was invited to an international meeting of writers. The indolence of the confined days of the present intertwines with multi-day wandering in a remote province of China. The basic canvas of the fiction is Ariadne’s sessions with her psychiatrist. The dim lighting of his office stimulated her imagination, an imagination “clearly bent on the dramatic.” Influenced by Epicurus, she was eagerly searching for the myth of bliss, of the ultimate freedom from fear, of stillness. Bound by a psyche that is ultimately fatal, the heroine is trapped “in the black circle of black scenarios, with herself on the brink of a total and inevitable disaster”. One day, Gabriel, her partner, tells her that music no longer moves him. Ariadne is horrified. He fails to grasp the consequences of the loss of pleasure. She was always afraid of what is missing, what is lost forever. What was missing was always her sadness. “Dry sorrow, no fat.” With the coronavirus, the sadness got worse. “Disaster, disease, death.” Ariadne lived absorbed in her thoughts. That means quarantine. “Being unable to move on to other thoughts.” The most serious problem of the novel is the lack of coherence, a consequence of the redundancy of disparate elements. Starting with the global horror of the deadly disease, Kolliakou overflows the fiction with all sorts of ramifications. Thus, in the narrative are mixed reports on the course and evolution of the pandemic, conspiracies about the spread of the virus, the French public education system, technological progress and the collateral damage of education, Arab immigrants, Islamic terrorists, Asians in the eyes of Westerns, a high school student who goes from Alice to Alexander, the ethics of veganism, the bookish skardadura, the martyrdom succession of incarcerations of an androgynous intellectual, both dissident poets, the male Nobel laureate, by the authoritarian regime of the Chinese government, a couple of their poems, an amorous afternoon of the heroine with a Chinese poet who participated in the conference, an old romantic disappointment of hers, epicurean aphorisms, all sprinkled with philosophical questions about the meaning of life and the fear of death. On top of that, the second person singular suddenly enters the narrative, as an amplifier, I suppose, of the heroine’s existential confusion, but also of the reader. The novel as a genre is extremely spacious, but still cannot accommodate everything. Especially when the author inserts without order various, heterogeneous, diligently topical, motifs on a canvas, which is obviously suffocating. Kolliakou, being an experienced storyteller, manages to maintain an effortless narrative pace. However, the connections he attempts, based mainly on emotional associations (for example, the Moulin Rouge distorted into a Red Cross), do not end in a solid composition. I don’t know if Ariadne, emerging from her mental labyrinth, finally conquers the chaos, but unfortunately all the reader gets is a complete mess.
#Ariadne #mito #DAILY