Customer Reviews

Swell (Europa Editions)

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(3.5 stars) Dimitrios Avgoustis, now seventy-five, has been a seaman in the Greek merchant marine for 58 years, a captain for much of that time, well respected by his crew. He is less respected by his family, however, especially by his less than steadfast wife Flora, an embittered, angry woman who was going to separate from him before she became pregnant with their son Andonis, twenty-two years ago. Mitsos has not written a letter home or looked at any photographs of his family in years. "I love my family but from a distance of ten thousand miles," he says, and for the last ten years, he has remained rooted to his ship, not even going ashore when the ship lands in port.

Telling Avgoustis's story obliquely from several points of view, including that of Litsa, the true love of his life, whom he has also abandoned in Greece, author Ioanna Karystiani creates a tender portrait of a proud man in thrall to the "swell," with little to draw him home. It is only when the reader discovers (early in the novel) that Mitsos is actually blind, something that he has been able to keep secret from everyone, including his crew, that some of his deliberate self-isolation begins to make sense. As long as he does not return to Greece or be available to meet company representatives, they cannot force him to give up his ship.

When Mitsos's wife Flora is enlisted by the owner's heir to talk Mitsos into retiring, she meets the ship and quickly discovers his blindness. She knows she must get him to retire on his own in order to get the one hundred thousand pounds promised by the ship's former owner. Though Flora leaves the ship, she sees to it that she has her own representative on board to help Mitsos make the "right" decision.

In the course of the novel, the author successfully creates strong feelings for Mitsos, however selfish he may have been, but these feelings for the main character develop slowly. Because the novel is impressionistic, the reader must fill in a great many blanks and make many connections with little help from the author before reaching a level of identification with Mitsos. Whole sections of the novel, printed in a different type, are the voice of someone who is not completely identified till fairly late, and it can sometimes be a bit frustrating reading these thoughts without knowing for sure whose they are. Names and the people to whom they refer are not always clear (many have unfamiliar nicknames), and some dialogue is difficult to follow because the names of the speakers are only rarely included with their comments. The author does present all the necessary information during the novel but leaves it up to the reader to process it, without the usual transitions. For the patient reader, Mitsos becomes an unforgettable character, proud and much more complex, emotionally, than he seems at first to be. This challenging novel rewards careful reading-and re-reading-and gives dramatic proof that for people like Mitsos Avgoustis, "The swell was everything." Mary Whipple

I tried to read two of Karystiani's novels: Swell and The Jasmine Isle. In both cases, I was astounded by the terrible quality of the English translations. Karystiani is an accomplished novelist in Greece, but you would never know it reading the translated works. The narrative in both books is nearly incomprehensible. I found myself re-reading the same sentences and paragraphs multiple times trying to decipher their meaning. Eventually, I just gave up. It's such a disservice to the author. I wonder if she's even aware of the issue. I would give the book a 1-star rating, but that would be unfair to the author since the translation is out of her control. I'll let the text speak for itself. Here are excerpts from both novels:

Swell:

That night, the next, the one after that and the six yet that followed till Japan, were spent by Avgoustis in his tiny living room, sleepless, right across from the closed door of the ship-owner's bedroom, the quarters, on and off, of the cats and of every Maritsa, since only once, at the very beginning, did any boss rest among its sheets, what with old Chadzimanolis having had his fill of the ocean and the son keeping his fond distance ever since 1979 when he made his first, and last, trip.

The Jasmine Isle:

The Aden-Bombay it was back then, saltpeter, the Indian Ocean had whipped itself into a frenzy, standing the Theomitor on its end, four days and nights bartering with Charon, goners for sure, twenty-two men heading for the bottom, and God knows, with the fury spent and the steamer on an even keel again, the captain was out of his mind, desperate to get the secret off his chest. More than half the crew from back home, but Saltaferos kept his distance at sea for the sake of discipline. He couldn't find the way, the courage -- "go on, Christos, fry me up a couple of eggs sunny side up" -- to tell the cook, who had a similar story himself in Chile, dipping into the yolk to tell the tale, every gross detail, someone should know, to cover every eventuality, so why not Christos, a good man, not wanting to put himself out, the card, and softhearted to boot, mother and daughters, the Chilean women in Valparaiso, he called Frosso, Tassoula, Vengelio, just like the others back in the Aegean.

-- the blind captain, but I found the going tough. I suspect that you either love the old rascal and his relationships, or not -- and I didn't. Structurally it reminded me of the outer eddies of a whirlpool, revisiting the same spot over and over. I read this as a book group choice, and would probably not have finished it otherwise.