Customer Reviews

Dinner with Persephone

5 star:		(23)
4 star:		(8)
3 star:		(7)
2 star:		(5)
1 star:		(11)

 

 

"Dinner with Persephone" chronicles Patricia Storace's experiences and observations during a year she spent living and traveling in Greece. I picked up this book this summer, and brought it with me for a 6-week stay in the Corinthia. In the end, it's a book I have extremely mixed feelings about.

At first I was delighted with the book. Yet as it wore on, I began to grow irritated with Storace's long diatribes. I continually got the sense that she feels she can describe Greeks, Greek culture, and Greek religion definitively in one book -- after living only a year in Athens! Many of her declarations about Greeks and Greek customs don't appear to be grounded in any real research, just her own musings and observations. Towards the end of the book and the end of her stay, she makes a day-trip to Turkey on a ferry, and then a week-long Istanbul trip soon after. Apparently, she feels this brief stay gives her full license to make some incredibly strong statements about the current social state of Turkish women. I couldn't believe her audacity -- this enraging section of the book doesn't seem based on any real encounters with Turkish women. Finally, her long and detailed accounts of how she parries the advances of various Greek and Turkish men grew tiring. Relating these encounters seems to serve little purpose except a lot of ego-stroking.

However, "Dinner with Persephone" still has a lot to recommend itself, mostly in its more poetic, light-hearted parts. Storace has some wonderful pieces of writing in here -- I loved her descriptions of place, and her account of swimming in the Saronic Gulf at the end of summer. I also enjoyed the story "The Godfather," as told to her by one of the many friends she makes along the way. The chapter that is a short biography of Penelope Delta seems slightly out of place, yet still fascinating. Most importantly, she does an admirable job of capturing the dramatic Greek landscape and makes an effort to include elements of Greece's modern history, one of the reasons why I was attracted to the book. These are the true gems of the book, making it a worthwhile read and one to hang onto.

I would recommend "Persephone" but warn the reader to take this in with a critical eye. Storace writes with enough authority to be dangerous -- I met a lot of Americans traveling in Greece who had read "Dinner with Persephone" and still regard her book as gospel! It's as if they're content to just let her opinions speak for Greek culture and not interact or draw any conclusions out of their own experience. I found that the Americans and Europeans I met who spend a great deal of time traveling and/or working in Greece were more critical of this book.

This is an incredibly provocative book, and even more so if the reader is of Greek descent or has spent considerable time in Greece. It is a valuable "must read", as it does a superb job in showing the quintessential slices of Greek life, the complexity of Greek history and identity, and the pathos and chronic idealization by the Greeks of their state, their land, their religion, their history, and themselves. Finally, her treatment of the psychology of the development of the individual within the larger family system and of relations within that system is brilliant.

My disappointments with this book are two. First, as another reviewer put it so well, "Unfortunately, she condescends towards the Greeks, and sees them as dysfunctional -- largely because they aren't American." It seems to me to be the first rule of travel writing, for an author, to get as involved in the people as one can; we always get a sense with this author, however, that she is a sort of pedagogue, or Anglophile foreign correspondent, who transmits "facts" in such a way that she is completely ignorant (or not) of their highly judgmental quality (something akin to the impression left by the phrase, "those charming peasants...".

Second, her writing style is prepossessing, overly involved, and filled with so many self-conscious clauses yearning to be lines of poetry that the reader can get the sense that she is simply trying to show off. I often found myself just wishing she'd say something simply, or without her tedious and endless analogies and metaphors.

In closing, there are some --if not racist -- then very distasteful references to Greeks en mass, something akin to "they all look alike". How ignorant and disappointing. Still, a thoroughly enjoyable, valuable, and provocative book, and one worth reading.

A woman from Alabama spends a year in Greece and shares her impressions. The classical statues are too beautiful and don't emphasize genitals enough. The icons of the Orthodox saints don't smile enough. The people don't smile enough. The wine is "bitter" or "stoney". The local banks won't let her have an account in her currency (dollars). Would a bank in Mobile allow an account in drachmas? This book is not an exercise in cultural relativity. The narrator often boasts of her knowledge of Greek, but her translations fall short of the mark. She confuses the word "power outage" with the word "vacation" and she hears the Greeks saying the the "power is taking a vacation". Cute, but not true. On a more serious note she distorts the key concept of "filotimo" (lit. "love of honor"), a quality that Greeks associate with a desire for dignity and self-sufficiency, into "hunger for prestige" and intolerance of criticism. She translates the triumphal exclamation of an Olympic gold medal winner (which in English would sound like "for Greece dammit!") into an unprintable obscenity that misses the point altogether. A chapter ends with this obscenity as if the narrator wants this negative image to linger. Several chapters end on such notes. When she doesn't mistranslate the Greek language she objects to the way the locals use it. She is antagonized by the use of "Mr and Mrs" before a person's name (a practise widespread through the Mediterranean: Monsieur et Madame, Signor et Signora, etc.). A hairdresser who goes by Mr. Emanuel, rather than dropping the Mr. in accordance to the US cultural norm, is made to appear pompous. The hairdresser's use of "Mr" gets much more airtime than the fact that he doesn't mind that she does not have enough maney to pay for the hairdo. We experience the people of Greece through long monologues that appear as if tape-recorded, without her participation or commentary. In general men are negatively portrayed, except a man she refers to as her friend, who wallows in self-pity and seems to hate being a Greek. The only woman who gets lavish praise is an inn-keeper who serves the narrator a meal with many smiles. Some less submissive women who befriend her (an actress and a tour guide) do not earn such praise . Other women are made to appear as man-crazy or obsessed mothers. It seems that unless the locals play Maimiti to the narrator's Christian Fletcher, they don't fare well. One of the most disturbing aspects of the book is that the narrator gets wined and dined by the locals and invited to their homes, and yet she develops no fellow feeling for them. Invited to a wedding, she criticizes everything from the too-lavish menu to the religious ceremony, which she finds politically incorrect. She is annoyed that the guests sing the American song "This land is your land...", becasue they cannot possibly grasp its populist message. While she comments freely (and quite subjectively) about any aspect of Greek society and history, when a local man refers (approvingly) to Clinton as a "pacifict" we get a long explication af how that man is ignorant of American politics and wrong. In another passage, she asserts that Greeks look pretty much alike and that makes it easier for them to stick together, while Americans look different from each other and have to work at unity. This book makes it seem OK to criticize someone else's religion and its symbols, to treat another language casually and to present a foreign culture in terms of a few negative stereotypes. In so doing, the author evokes in my mind some stereotypes about her place of origin.

I am busy reading this book, in Greece, and came here to try and get some insight and background on the author. As someone who first came to Greece 35 years ago, married an Athenian girl, and have lived in Greece for 10 of those years (we are now "some of the many people who have eaten the seeds of the pomegranate and live our lives in the pattern of Persephone" - six months on our island, six in Athens), I was totally knocked out by this dense, exuberant and very perceptive account of a year in Greece, astonished at the author's depth of knowledge of Classical, Byzantine, and Modern Greek history, and her proficiency in the Greek language, her poet's love of words, her sensitivity. I delighted in the descriptions of familiar places, people, attitudes and the festive occasions and rhythms of the Greek religious calendar, so many of them joyously preserved from pagan times. On virtually every page I learned new facts, gained new insight into things dimly understood, and smiled at wonderful descriptions of familiar situations. I became intrigued to learn more about the writer's background, the source of her fascination with the country, history and culture and the underlying reason for her stay.. Was this her first visit? Has she been back? I would love to spend a long summer evening at an outdoor taverna with Patricia and her friends, learning more about her and sharing that mixture of exasperation and love which is such a common response of expatriates in Greece. Worthy to be ranked with Henry Miller ("Colossus of Maroussi") and Lawrence Durrell ("Prospero's Cell" et.al.) as a literary chronicler of Greece.

"Dinner with Persephone" is much more than a travel book -- it's a portrait of a culture, a beautifully written account of the author's year in Greece. Patricia Storace lived in Athens and traveled to towns and islands in Greece throughout her stay there. She describes the people, the customs, the festivals, and day to day life in Greece as she experienced them during her year there. There's a enough description of landscapes, archtitecture and events to make an armchair traveler happy, but the book's real strength is its illumination of the Greek way of life. We come to understand the Greek worldview, and what everyday life in Greece might be like.

I can't help thinking that earlier reviewers on this page might be Turks or Greeks who took offense to some of Patricia Storace's observations -- their reactions to her book are disproportinately harsh, and their comments indicate that they either misunderstood some of what they read, or didn't read the book all the way through.

If every nation had a Patricia Storace to describe its people and culture to the world, we'd understand the reasons behind our differences, and maybe accept them more easily.

This book is an interesting juxtaposition of travelogue and mythology. As a child, Storace was fascinated with the stories and characters of Greek mythology. This led to a life-long fascination with Greece and Greeks, not only of the ancient culture, but as they are today. In this book, Storace takes us on a journey to her Greece, a land that is inseparable from its mythic past. She narrates to us stories of people she met in Greece, repeating the stories they told her, all the while relating the stories to the ancient tales from Greek mythology. As a travel journal, the book is a little heavy on allusions and symbolism and a little light on realistic imagery. But direct descriptions of events is not what this book is about-instead it is the personal story of how Storace finds meaning in Greek culture through her own integration of history, mythology and observation of contemporary society.

Lacking any sense of self criticism, a small sector of the English speaking Greek diaspora has found this book objectionable, at least in part. That is unfortunate, because I happen to love Greece and the Greek people and I found this account of the author's year in Greece to be great fun, truthful, thoughtful,insightful, and all the other fulls one expects from an American woman who goes to live for a while in any foreign country, and especially a Mediterranean country. The author gets involved in nearly every aspect of everyday Greek life and her descriptions of family interactions are great. She even includes a description of the MANGAS in his various rescensions. Public utilites companies come in for their share of criticism and scorn, all rightfully deserved. There is a discussion of transvestites and a famous novelist who gets murdered by one of his tricks. Holding the whole thing together is the Greek DREAM BOOK, which one consults to find out what dreams really mean. Their only problem is that they wear out quickly and a new one must be bought. Stamatis is a fascinating character who appears now and then throughout the book and helps the narrator to get a hold on things, to understand better what she sees and hears. He is like an all-knowing spiritual presence who provides meaning when it seems to be lacking. His only problem is that he is usually leaving for somewhere the next day. Toward the end of the book there is a long chapter on Penelope Delta that bothered me at first because I thought it was a senseless excursus, but by the time I finished I was very glad to have read it. Sometimes the book's tone is stridently feminist, but all in all it is great fun and quite poetic.

This rich account is for the dedicated enthusiast who wants to know as much about Greece as possible. Though sometimes repetitive, Storace's journey through the country is informative and educational: in my umpteen trips to Athens' "The Old Man of Morea Taverna," only now do I know that the reference is to a famous general. She points out ironies of Greek life such as the way the country embraces yet rejects the rest of Europe ("Greece is neither western nor eastern Europe, but oriental Europe, where Europe and the Middle East live together, although they may pretend they have never met") and the fact that love and violence are an integral part of daily life. Storace explains idiomatic terms such as "fthonos," "poisonous omnipresent jealousy" and "We even have bird's milk," a phrase used by grocers to hint that they have absolutely everything. Actually, I'm the one who's jealous. During my own year in Greece, I wasn't invited to half as many interesting parties and events. Storace's sense of humor puts things in perspective: "Although there are certain kinds of men I find irresistible, my temptations don't include married Greek dry cleaners." I had only minor disagreements: I've never found the Ionian Sea warmer than the Aegean, I like Corfu's Achilleion, and I'm not convinced all literary tragedies have happy endings. Her writing is often poetic and lyrical. For example, she describes the "sexual, tender, exalted, and tragic moment as candle touches candle, brief life kindling brief life, again and again, like the moment of conception." I can certainly sympathize with her feelings about leaving Greece: "Tonight I am saying goodbye the way Athenians do, that is, by staying up all night and trying to stop time." The working title of my own novel was "Going and Going to Greece." The country is magical--Storace's book helps us understand some reasons why.

I just finished reading this book after buying it for my Greek-American mother last Christmas, and I found the book to be an enchanting view of Greece from an outside perspective.

Patricia Storace has captured many of the contradictions of Greece, Hellenism and the Greek Orthodox soul; all while telling refreshingly entertaining stories. To read this book as a critique of modern Greek society or Hellenic history would be a grave mistake...that clearly is not the author's intention. Instead, Storace provides a satisfying and sometimes critical outsider's travelogue which took me back to the Greece that I grew up in and love with all its beauty, strength and flaws.

I recommend this book for its light yet refreshingly intriguing approach to life in modern Greece.

4 is being a bit generous...I'd give this about 3 1/2 stars.

She's not a bad writer--flowing, but a little pretenious. My main problem with the book is her rather degrading comments towards Greeks and Turks. She seems to make little effort to truly understand either culture, but rather judges it through American eyes.

At the same time, I can definitely understand her prespective, even if I disagree with it. I'm just finishing up a 3-month semester aboard in Athens (I'm orginially from Chicago), and I also visited Turkey twice for a total of 3 weeks. There is much about this culture that is baffling and difficult for Americans. Her descriptions (of Greece) are often accurate, but biased. I find her to be frustratingly inaccurate when it comes Turkey.

Her book is good entertainment reading, but if you really want a slice of Greek or Turkish culture...go to the country and form your own conclusions. Both cultures are complex and not easily reduced by her comments...