Dinner with Persephone: Travels in Greece [Paperback]

Patricia Storace (Author)

Book Description

Release date: September 2, 1997

A New York Times Notable Book of the Year

"Full of insights, marvelously entertaining . . . haunting and beautifully written."
--The New York Review of Books

"I lived in Athens, at the intersection of a prostitute and a saint."  So begins Patricia Storace's astonishing memoir of her year in Greece. Mixing affection with detachment, rapture with clarity, this American poet perfectly evokes a country delicately balanced between East and West.

Whether she is interpreting Hellenic dream books, pop songs, and soap operas, describing breathtakingly beautiful beaches and archaic villages, or braving the crush at a saint's tomb, Storace, winner of the Whiting Award, rewards the reader with informed and sensual insights into Greece's soul. She sees how the country's pride in its past coexists with profound doubts about its place in the modern world. She discovers a world in which past and present engage in a passionate dialogue. Stylish, funny, and erudite, Dinner with Persephone is travel writing elevated to a fine art--and the best book of its kind since Henry Miller's The Colossus of Maroussi.

"Splendid. Storace's account of a year in Greece combines past and present, legend and fact, in an unusual and delightful whole. "
--Atlantic Monthly

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

For many, Greece is a land lost in time. It conjures up images of the looming Parthenon with its pillars of marble and the timeless whitewashed buildings of its parched islands glinting against a backdrop of the crystal blue Mediterranean. But ask about contemporary Greece and most people draw a blank. In Dinner with Persephone, poet Patricia Storace does a compelling job of filling in this empty canvas. She conjures a country where history and modernity coexist in often surprising ways, and with the past as an ineluctable backdrop, Storace paints in the everyday details that bring the country and its people vividly to life. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Publishers Weekly

A scoop of ice cream decorated with pomegranate seeds is the Persephone of the title?a Greek confection the author orders at a patisserie in Athens where she and a companion stop after a climb to the theater of Dionysus. Her companion chooses a "Leda"?two scoops of vanilla covered with rosettes and studded with tiny paper Greek flags. These are apt symbols of the great past that dominates the everyday life and consciousness of modern Greeks. Like them, Storace smoothly entwines her own daily encounters, during the year she lived in Athens, with the country's history and legends, current politics and neighborhood activities. A prize-winning poet, she has the advantage of a facility with the language, and has access to Greek friends and cultural guides who are often as probing and intellectual as she is. Her journal of that year provides minutely detailed observations, conversations, shopping tours, parties, religious and national holidays, passengers on a bus, street noises, visits to historic spots and even the plots of Greek movies. Though sometimes exasperating in its indiscriminate detail, at the same time the book immerses the reader more deeply than do many other accounts of an American abroad in a vibrant sense of the country's past and present.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 416 pages
• Publisher: Vintage (September 2, 1997)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0679744789
• ISBN-13: 978-0679744788
• Product Dimensions: 5.2 x 0.9 x 8.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12.8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (55 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #573,075 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

48 of 52 people found the following review helpful

3.0 out of 5 stars Beautiful prose, but... August 6, 2001

By B-Track

Format:Paperback

"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.

38 of 44 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars She Knows Just Enough To Be Dangerous... July 9, 2000

By Dr. Theodore Bililies

Format:Paperback

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.

37 of 44 people found the following review helpful

1.0 out of 5 stars An arrogant and unsympathetic book about a foreign culture. January 17, 1999

By A Customer

Format:Paperback

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.