always hope

This is a volume of seven short stories whose gripping and contextual theme is what it means to live in quarantine. It all begins with just two texts featuring the author’s detective hero, Commissioner Jaritos, a very old police officer who plays a role in the entire saga of Márkaris’ detective novels read around the world. This hero is characterized by his closeness to ordinary mortals, as well as being smart and understanding; this closeness is emphasized by his family relationships, both with his wife Adrianí, his mother and housewife, and with his daughter, son-in-law, and his wife. Torun carries important human characteristics in all his stories.

In the first story, Jaritos has to quarantine at home because he came into contact with someone who had Covid. Although the plot includes a murder that is solved very logically, it is characteristic of the author’s narrative; action is always dominant here; Focusing on the case through approach procedure, investigative questions and solution is what happens most. The important thing is to be “arrested” at home. This means suffering through forced coexistence, clearly defining words like quarantine and isolation, and adapting to electronic media in the workplace, always being under the prism of what everyone knows. In the second text, it is quite an allegorical situation that he comes face to face with a murderer who believes that he has Covid and commits murder on his behalf.

The rest of the stories are more personal and personalized: a little family story about overcoming a Greek family that starts selling hand-painted masks; life on the street and the relationship of two poor people, Kosmas and Dimos; The story of three lovely characters, Pericles, Socrates and Plato, and their lives spent collecting garbage; the competition between two restaurant owners, one Turkish and the other Greek, and how to ensure a happy union; To end with a charming metaphor with a cute bicycle, a story that is more than cute and an epilogue, telling about the author’s childhood and youth memories spent on an island in the Marmara Sea. In all of them, a high degree of empathy and sympathy for the characters is encouraged; always simple and effective for the stories, with a high degree of emotionality in each of the endings. Features supported by active narrative perspectives: In the first three stories and the last one, the author chooses the first person, and in the rest he uses the omniscient third-person narrator.

This thematic and narrative effectiveness is achieved through very direct prose, without the desire for dialectical complications, using lively and expressive dialogue; because the impact on the reader is provided by the characters themselves and their stories, which are always contextualized by a concrete social context. Political component of Greek problems: relations between different social groups, historical and political problems of Greece (“After giving up communism, my father decided to become part of the peasantry”, p. 105), constant conflict with Turkey and Greek migration to Europe. But in addition, this touch of condemnation is not exempt from the use of humor: «In this region, B.C. in the period. C. that is, before the coronavirus” (p.133); The strategy he also uses to characterize the personal, as in the case of poor pronunciation of Turkish: “When my mother heard my aunt say Hello Sikí Bey, that is, Good day Pene Bey, she shyly ran to hide in the kitchen” (p. 225).

So why should you read this book of literary stories? Because they show a reality that we know well, but affects issues from a different geography, that is not foreign to us as humans, and that can be a reminder of many things that we say we cannot forget. during the epidemic. Also, reading Márkaris is always a simple pleasure.