Apartment in Athens (New York Review Books Classics) [Paperback]

Glenway Wescott (Author), David Leavitt (Introduction), David Leavitt (Author)

Book Description

Series: New York Review Books Classics | Publication Date: April 30, 2004

Like Wescott's extraordinary novella The Pilgrim Hawk (which Susan Sontag described in The New Yorker as belonging "among the treasures of 20th-century American literature"), Apartment in Athens concerns an unusual triangular relationship. In this story about a Greek couple in Nazi-occupied Athens who must share their living quarters with a German officer, Wescott stages an intense and unsettling drama of accommodation and rejection, resistance and compulsion—an account of political oppression and spiritual struggle that is also a parable about the costs of closeted identity.

Editorial Reviews

Review

A fine study in humiliation and nobility, and their culmination in tragedy and desperate resolve…its moderateness, lack of exaggeration, and serenity are admirable as the Greek ideal they reflect and honor. Everywhere is the dignity of a style in which there is nothing wasteful and nothing wanting.
— Eudora Welty

I have not read any other book—either of fiction or direct documentation—which has given me the feeling of starving and stifling, of falling back on interior positions, constructing interior defenses, reorganizing and redirecting, behind a mask of submission, the whole structure and aim of one’s life, as Apartment in Athens does.
— Edmund Wilson

About the Author

Glenway Wescott (1901-1987) was the author of the novels The Grandmothers and Apartment in Athens, in addition to several collections of stories and essays. His life—as revealed in his published journals and a joint biography of him and his lover, Monroe Wheeler—has been the subject of increasing interest in recent years.

David Leavitt ’s books include The Man Who Knew Too Much: Alan Turing and the Invention of the Computer and the novel The Indian Clerk, a finalist for both the PEN/Faulkner Prize and the IMPAC /Dublin Literary Award. He co-directs the MFA program in Creative Writing at the University of Florida.

Product Details

• Paperback: 296 pages
• Publisher: NYRB Classics (April 30, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1590170814
• ISBN-13: 978-1590170816
• Product Dimensions: 4.9 x 0.7 x 8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 10.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #674,283 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Discover books, learn about writers, read author blogs, and more.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

28 of 28 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Wescott's study of character under adversity, July 10, 2004

By 

Jay Dickson (Portland, OR) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (TOP 1000 REVIEWER)   

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Apartment in Athens (New York Review Books Classics) (Paperback)

His 1945 APARTMENT IN ATHENS may lack the dazzling structurations of his recently rediscovered and greatly celebrated novella THE PILGRIM HAWK, but it is told with the same crystalline prose and is perhaps a deeper study of character. Mr. and Mrs. Helianos are a couple living in Nazi-occupied Athens forced to share their apartment with a melancholy German officer; vaguely mistreated by him, they learn to bear up under their hardships for a good year. Then he leaves for a vacation in Germany and returns behaving suddenly much more gently and kindly towards them, a change of heart that signals disaster for the lives of all of them. The story, inspired by an anecdote told by a Greek freedom fighter to Wescott, is perhaps not as dense as you'd like on first reading (there are none of the sort of Jamesian twists we might expect), but the difficult ethical positions of the Helianoses become clearer the more you think about the work later. This short novel is a very sophisticated study of the problems and evils inherent in human sympathy during a time of war.

13 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The everydayness of evil, September 20, 2005

By 

Erica Bell (Washington State) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Apartment in Athens (New York Review Books Classics) (Paperback)

What makes this small masterpiece trouble your sleep is the brilliant way in which Glenway Westcott portrayed marriage, intimacy, and the essential decency of the Helianos couple...each of which would prove their downfall. Mr. and Mrs. Helianos' profound misjudgement of their brutal guest originates in their belief in a certain threshhold of humanity below which real people do not fall. But people do, and the portrayal of the Nazi officer billeted in their house is chilling, to say the least. What keeps the reader up at night is the realization that he would have acted as the Helianos' did...and been just as wrong as they were.

Ah, if this had been merely a war story, tragically told, it would be nothing--there are thousands. But Wescott's prose is a marvel. The Helianos marriage emerges as a series of compromises made first in resentment, later out of laziness, and lastly, with love. Their (and their children's) descent into semi-starvation is so subtly, so relentlessly portrayed. And Mrs. Helianos is the most complete female character to emerge from American literature during those war years--she's marvelously mediocre and whiney at the beginning of this nightmare, and a miracle when she emerges. We see her on that kitchen floor, the linoleum flooded with heat and light, as she pieces together her husband's smuggled toilet paper letter. When she rises with the little pieces in her hand, we are seeing a new creature, a truly Athenian goddess, descending from Olympus to avenge us all. Wescott was a genius.

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A fine study of humiliation and nobility, February 4, 2006

By 

HORAK (Zug, Switzerland) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Apartment in Athens (New York Review Books Classics) (Paperback)

This novel was published in 1945 and tells the harrowing tale of the Helianos family in Athens during the German occupation of Greece. Nikolas Helianos is a middle-aged part-owner and editor of a publishing house. He and his wife have a ten-year-old daughter Leda and a twelve-year-old son Alex. Their twenty-year-old son Cimon died in a battle at Mount Olympus in 1941. Mrs Helianos has reached the point of desperation of war when nothing else matters except the survival of her loved ones.
Nikolas Helianos, a sedentary and philosophical man, does not participate in the underground or any sort of organised resistance to the occupiers of Greece. His relatives let him know that they consider him a coward and he is therefore particularly despondent when his family have to take a German officer, Ernst Robert Kalter, to live in their apartment. Nikolas sees that this is bound to bring disgrace as things stand between him and his kinsmen and he knows that it is the weak who are timid and conciliatory. Now in the actual physical presence of Kalter he is less than ever able to correct his character although he knows how deeply his wife hates the invaders of Greece since they took her first and best child's life.
But little does Nikolas know how this forced confinement with the enemy is to turn out in fact and how the heroic Helianos' are later to speak of him, if not a true hero, at least a martyr.
The serenity, moderateness and lack of sensation of the plot are worthy of a true Greek tragedy. The protagonists are conducting a psychological war against the enemy, building interior defences behind the mask of obedience and submission like walls to protect their lives.