Book Review | Landscape with Dog

To gain a wide and appreciative international audience, writers need to be published in English translation, as is happening with most European authors. Ersi Sotiropoulos, an acclaimed Greek novelist and short story-writer in her own country, became known internationally when her fifth novel, Zig-zag through the Bitter Oranges, was published in translation in 2006. The novel described as the ‘best novel of the decade’ had won both the Greek State Prize for Literature and the Book Critics Award.

Landscape with Dog and Other Stories was published in 2010. It was brilliantly translated by Karen Emmerich. Authors can be greatly helped if they leave their work in capable hands. Translation is not easy, and when it is not done properly it can ruin an author’s work.  It is an art form, where the novel needs to read as though it had been thought and written in English in the first place. This is what Karen Emmerich does with the work in hand.

In this slim book, Sotiropoulos presents a collection of 17 stories mostly set in Greece, a few in Italy. The main topic is the relationship between couples: married, lovers, parents, siblings. They are honest, matter of fact, true-to-life accounts of ordinary events that can occur in most relationships, and yet one is aware of great depth underneath the apparent simplicity. The author chooses a deliberately flat style which makes very easy reading, at the same time creating images, strange and evocative, that defy an easy interpretation. Being a postmodern author, Sotiropoulos offers fragmentary, snapshot views of people and leaves it up to us to construct what is actually happening between them.

The stories are like a series of alleyways leading nowhere and the reader is left to guess what is happening or what could have been. There are no beginnings or endings in the conventional sense. Questions are raised but no solutions are provided… none, at least, that could allow for an easy conclusion. In one of the more tender stories (Christmas with Leo), after the narrator recounts to her dog, Leo, the story about her love affair, she remarks:

‘He isn’t satisfied with the denouement. He wants something more, I know. A happy ending or some big drama. But there is nothing I can do. That something doesn’t exist.  And I don’t want to lie to him’.
Sotiropoulos is also an accomplished poet, so the stories have a strong emphasis on imagery, which is piled layer on layer and contrasts sharply with the simplicity of the prose. In effect, the titular story reads like a prose poem.

The Exterminator, on the other hand, carries a nightmarish, Kafkaesque atmosphere. A writer trying to find some serenity to finish her work is living on an island where her room is invaded by rodents and roaches. She tries all kinds of poison to kill them. Instead, they only increase: ‘The rodenticides seemed also to have an aphrodisiac effect: she had the impression that the mouse population was steadily increasing. The mice now roamed freely through the house even before it got dark, went on walks with their kids, had parties and invited friends from neighbouring fields and barns’.

When she calls the exterminator in an attempt to get rid of them, he is the one who dies.  But even in this encounter with death, the authors resists any facile interpretation or understanding.
The Pinball King tells the story of a brother and sister accompanying a pair of Italian tourists driving to Delphi. They get lost on the way and end having a Dionysian feast with a goatherd and his wife. But the enigmatic relationship between the siblings is never explained up to the end of the story.

Sotiropoulosis is one of Greece’s most challenging postmodern writers. At home, she has been attacked by extreme right wing factions for a non-national ideology which is at times present in her writings but not evident in this volume.

The stories in Landscape with Dog are all compellingly rich and readable, while gently teasing one’s intellect.