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What Does Mrs. Freeman Want?

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The late writer and novelist Petros Abatzoglou (1931-2004) grew up during the Nazi occupation of Greece, traveled extensively in Europe and America during his 30s, the settled in Greece where he lived the rest of his life. In addition to writing for newspapers and the radio, Abatzoglou authored numerous short stories and several novels. For What Does Mrs. Freeman Want?, he received the National Book Award in 1988. This is also his first novel translated into English. While lying on a beach in Greece with a female companion, the novel's narrator tells the story of a fiercely independent woman called "Mrs. Freeman". In his narration, the storyteller reveals an obsession with food, alcohol, and the need to be the center of a woman's attention as he paints a mental portrait of his own vision of the "ideal" woman. At times digressive, tender, humorous, pedantic, patronizing, and misogynist, What Does Mrs. Freeman Want? is also brilliant, engaging, and just the kind of novel that lingers on in the mind of the reader long after it has been finished and set back upon the bookshelf leaving us looking forward to more of Petros Abatzoglou's work to be translated into English by Kay Cicellis for an appreciative American readership.

This book is suitable either to read all at once or to pick it up and lay it down. The way the book is written is a series of stop and go. The author himself is the narrator; his subject is Mrs. Freeman's courtship and marriage with a university linguistics professor. All the while the storyteller sits on the insect-ridden sand, takes a cooling swim in the sea, sips ouzo between bites of feta cheese, olives, and other delicacies. The story is invariably interesting, like a conversation; the storyteller's indescribable companion can easily morph into yourself. There is a text within a text. Petros's story is about Mrs. Freeman's, which also pulls Freeman's and some others' into its orbit.