“Ça y est,” Georges Simenon said the day he ended his literary career. That’s it. He sat at his desk, looked at the paper, and found no words to put on it. Before then, he had written more than 400 novels, produced in mad rushes via steady routine — an absurd pace of roughly six to eight thousand words a day, reportedly — and then the spigot stopped. Philip Roth imagined a stage actor facing a similar crisis in the first lines of 2009’s The Humbling, his penultimate novel: “He’d lost his magic. The impulse was spent.” Such sudden endings open a question about beginnings: What creates the impulse to make art in the first place?
Perhaps the question contains the answer: the first place. For the novelist Theodor Kallifatides, that’s his native Greece. Kallifatides is 80 now, writing in his adopted home of Sweden after emigrating there when he was 25. And as he declares in the opening pages of his memoir, Another Life, the muse has abandoned him just as it did Simenon and Roth’s depleted actor. Kallifatides has had a productive career, writing a raft of books in Swedish — though only one prior book of his has been translated into English — but by 2015 he feared that he, too, had lost his magic. “Every book was a bridge to the next,” he writes. “Almost like love affairs. But now it was 2015, and my strength was dwindling.”
He’s resolved the problem, obviously; we have the book he wrote about it. So the tension in the book — which is slim and mostly genial, but at its best in its tensions — comes from his explanation of how he resolved it. Att first, he thinks that a fix might come from tweaking his powers of observation, changing his routines — say, switching the sidewalk he takes to his Stockholm office. But something bigger is going on. He is losing his grasp on his art, it becomes clear, because he has lost his grasp on the kind of society he is living in. He strains to make sense of news stories about refugees being refused entry or mistreated, as well as reports from his native Greece as it tries to pull out of the muck of economic crisis.
Seeing the cruelty first-hand, however, leaves the deepest mark and confusion. He recalls a recent visit to Athens, where he watched German shepherds guard the front of a department store. “They wagged their tails when a genuine customer appeared but growled threateningly at poor immigrants and Greeks, men and women alike,” he writes. Witnessing this, he recalls the propaganda posters he saw in his youth during the Nazi occupation, portraying Greeks as dim apes in trees. In this manifestation of the return of the repressed, memories of propaganda threaten to disgrace his art, which is why he can’t just set his writing aside like Simenon, or heed the friend who says nobody should write after 75 anyway. Kallifatides’ crisis is determining how he will respond to imagery that has haunted him but stayed under wraps for decades.
“I thought about what Philip Roth had said — that you can’t write when the memories disappear,” he thinks. So he begins switching sidewalks in other ways to stoke memories, to re-engage with place. Small, at first: He tweets. He says that he joined Twitter in 2015 to get rid of “a sentence that was buzzing around my head like a horsefly.” He doesn’t say what the sentence was. It probably wasn’t the first tweet of his I could find, which Microsoft translates as “Why do journalists leave e-mail addresses when they still never respond?” That’s a classic subtweet of the wounded Grub Street freelancer, but I suspect he meant the pronouncement he tweeted the next day: “Freedom of expression and love are to be eaten with knives and forks, sisters and brothers.” That’s a subtweet, too, Another Life suggests, but with a more meaningful target: Kallifatides was fuming at the inhumanity that has marked the refugee crisis, more specifically political cartoons that render Angela Merkel in a Hitler mustache. Freedom of expression, as his tweet suggests, ought to be taken more seriously than such a gross caricature that is no better than Goebbels’ Greek apes. When Kallifatides wrote an op-ed on the subject, he was shocked by the blowback. “I had … lost respect for these matadors of the new liberalism,” he writes. “I had expected more generosity toward the weak, more empathy. I was wrong.”
So, he switches sidewalks in a larger way: He goes back to Greece. In Athens, he is struck by what time has time has done to the places he had romanticized in his youth. “Poverty was an old friend, but not this misery,” he writes. “Boarded-up shops, unlit streets, the homeless sleeping everywhere, the stench of excrement, and on top of all this, an air of violence that made my heart beat faster. For the first time I could remember, I was afraid to go out alone in Athens.”
Another Life is a chronicle of Kallifatides’ journey, but the journey is more inner than outer. It isn’t a travelogue so much as an attempt to reconcile the hypocrisies he sees in his homeland with the hypocrisies he finds in himself, the way both person and country have messy, divided selves. On native ground, he recognizes his identity as having become self-erased, dehumanized: “I was turning into a photograph of myself,” “Emigration is a kind of partial suicide.” The parts can never be fully reconciled, however, even if you head back. Putting himself physically in the place where he grew up is to feel at home, but also to recognize that little of what he grew up with has remained static.
Still, Kallifatides wants to repair the break, even if he knows the bones won’t knit quite right. He is heartened by a conversation with an 82-year-old shopkeeper who fumes that she wants to live to 118 to spite the locals who want to take over her business. She, too, is a migrant, having grown up in Greece before moving to America, then returning. There’s a bittersweet stubborness to the woman’s attitude that he finds captivating, even inspiring. Asked by his wife why he spent an hour on a shopping trip that should have taken minutes, he responds, “I’ve been learning that people never give up.”
Kallifatides, like every migrant returning home, has a choice: clear-eyed memories or soft-focus nostalgia. In the closing sections of Another Life, he gives in to the latter for a bit — his writing turns romantic and even mawkish, especially as he and his wife visit his rural hometown, where a school is being renamed in his honor. “Greece might have all the problems in the world, but it retains life’s sweetness,” a waiter tells him, and “sweetness” becomes a kind of trope for the remainder of Kallifatides’ travels. He resists the notion at first — “It’s dignity I want. Without that even honey tastes bitter.” But sweetness keeps arriving: the sweetness of friendship, the sweetness of the figs given to him by a man on the street, and the sweetness of the gesture, of the teachers and students he meets, of the performance given to receive him. And a final sweetness, his endeavoring to write in Greek for the first time in 50 years: “After the very first word I was aware of an incomprehensible sweetness in my mouth, as if I hadn’t eaten honey. Sweetness and relief.”
It’s hard to begrudge Kallifatides this. Writing in his native language, visiting his native land — his first place — he finds that switching sidewalks works, that he can find a more meaningful sense of self by taking the risk of acquiring a new one. (“This time I was emigrating from myself,” he writes. “I was gradually becoming someone else.”) That sense of self will always be complicated, though —after all, the migrants are still there, as are the propagandistic caricatures that diminish them. Sweetness isn’t a meaningful migrant policy; nostalgia won’t resettle refugees. But, Kallifatides suggests, we might get closer to the world we want if can we learn to re-enact the migrant’s journey in ourselves.
[Published by Other Press, September 25, 2018. 144 pages, $22.95 hardcover]