Something Will Happen, You'll See

January 25, 2016
In Ikonomou’s timely novel, the human fallout of the Greek economic recession is writ large. In these 15 stories of poverty and institutional disfunction, Ikonomou’s heroes—the laboring, often-unemployed masses crushed by debt and hunger—seek solace from their debilitating realties in memory (“Charcoal Mustache”), dreams (“Foreign. Exotic.”), and liquor (“The Blood of the Onion”), only to come up against an implacable and corrupt system that erodes their humanity, breaking up families and repossessing property. Concerned with the bottom rungs of the social ladder, pieces such as “Mao,” about a young, cat-loving vigilante in a crime-infested neighborhood, or “Placard and Broomstick,” in which a grocery stocker mounts a feeble protest against unsafe working conditions, cover an astonishing range. Then there’s the centerpiece, a daring experiment called “The Things They Carried,” which references the famous Tim O’Brien story (and book) of the same name, except that Ikonomou’s peasants carry nothing but unpaid bills and “the weight of their weakness, the weight of time, of the sicknesses that ate at their bodies.” These stories add up to a panorama of the human spirit under siege and a searing indictment of the failures to reform the Greek infrastructure.

February 15, 2016
A collection of soul-grindingly bleak stories with the barest glimmers of human resilience. The author of these stories (All Good Things Will Come from the Sea, 2014) makes Raymond Carver read like Anne Tyler. All of them are set in the harbor district of his native Athens, but this is no tourist's Greece. It could be termed a working-class neighborhood, but many of the protagonists are no longer working, and their existence is barely hand-to-mouth, for too often there is nothing in the hand to reach the mouth. Sometimes their jobs have been lost to political upheaval, but there are no political solutions to their existential dilemmas, no party that is better than any other. Occasionally, characters believe that their plights will somehow capture the attention of the media. In the closing story, "Piece By Piece They're Taking My World Away," someone whose home has been lost to eminent domain says, "I'm sure they'll say something on TV. That's something, at least. At some point they'll say something on TV for sure." But the reader who has heard similar hopes from other characters here knows that there will be no media attention, at least not before the story ends, as they invariably do, without resolution, leaving the characters in limbo. Though the opening "Come on Ellie, Feed the Pig" evokes "the smell of the malicious poverty that is slowly and silently and confidently gnawing at Ellie's dreams and strength and life," her situation is better than most. She has some money, if not much, and the worst that seems to happen is a lover's betrayal, as others have betrayed her previously. She hasn't lost anyone close to her in a violent explosion, and there's no sense that the next day she faces homelessness, joblessness, or starvation. So, she's one of the lucky ones. The protagonist of one story, driven to the brink of madness by a friend's shocking workplace death, wants "to write something that would express unspeakable rage and hatred and love and despair all at once." Such sentiments could be the writer's own.

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Starred review from January 1, 2016

A woman finds peace in the simple task of washing lettuce as she considers the latest man to abandon her. A man angrily swears that this will be the last time he fetches his younger brother, once again badly beaten for his political protests. A young man whose sister was gang-raped moodily stands guard in the neighborhood, at first winning the admiration but finally the scorn of the neighbors. These are some of the stories in award-winning Greek author Ikonomou's latest collection, and if they're sometimes wrenchgingly brutal, they're always exactingly and beautifully told, delivering a sense of the hardscrabble lives in currently beleagured Greece--or anywhere, for that matter. VERDICT This strong and affecting work is accessible to all readers and will draw fans of Donald Ray Pollack, Claire Vaye Watkins, Bonnie Jo Campbell, and Wells Tower.

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