Iulis Tsakalou BOOK CRITIC
He unfolds stories, while a key element of his novels is love, which he considers a tool for exploring human psyches and times. The author talks regarding his book “The Nightingales of Silence”.
Stefanos Dandolos, three years following “The trial that changed the world” and following “History without a name” became a theatrical success and “Flame and wind” was transferred to television, returns with a riveting novel “The nightingales of silence”, a story regarding the value of innocence in the deepest darkness. What is the trigger of this new journey?
I wanted to remind the Greeks of that dark period from the Liberation to the Decembers and at the same time tell a story regarding how people become homelands by themselves. I wanted to talk regarding good versus evil, love versus hate, devotion versus oblivion. You see, the fall and winter of 1944 was a time that began with light because of the flight of the Germans and ended in darkness because of the civil passions that turned Athens into a skull place. Within this mosaic of violence and conflicts, I contrast two candles that are fighting not to go out. It is my heroes, Mr. Aristides and his Eudoxia, who constitute this light in the darkness.
The title “The Nightingales of Silence” comes from a conversation that Odysseus Elytis says to the kind waiter Mr. Aristides. Do you enjoy incorporating real people into your stories?
Yes, because they give the reader a deeper picture of the era. The book focuses on the legendary Kafeneion Zaharatou, which was located in Syntagma Square for more than half a century, and Mr. Aristides was its longest-serving waiter. Next was to talk regarding the famous patrons. On the pages parade people like Elytis, Veakis, Logothetidis, Eleni Papadakis, and even Winston Churchill who was almost assassinated in Athens at Christmas 1944.
What can the Decembers tell us regarding today?
They can lead us to associations. Perhaps the trauma that opened then, and culminated later in the Civil War, has not completely closed within us. We are a people who are easily divided, who effortlessly come to conflict. We see it every day on social media, in the news, on the streets, everywhere. The ease with which we demolish our neighbor if we do not agree with him is probably related to the hidden wounds that have been malformed from generation to generation.
Can these hidden wounds of the Civil War be healed today, at a time when Greek society has other open wounds in front of it?
Maybe it’s a little late. We have evolved, you see, with mistrust of one another’s motives as our guide, which makes it difficult for us to move forward in complete harmony. But I hope so. I hope in the next generations, in my son’s generation, who is now eleven years old. Perhaps he and his fellow travelers will free the future Greek society from the nightmarish syndromes of the past.
The hero of the book reminds you to a certain extent of the Homeric Odysseus, since the journey to his beloved in the middle of the Decembrians resembles the journey to Ithaca. Was there a deeper intention to talk regarding the meaning of the journey?
I’m glad you notice, because it does. Mr. Aristides tries to cross the burning Athens, struggles to reach his Eudoxia in the days when the battle has reached its peak, in the middle of that December. While thousands of Greeks have taken to the streets and are fighting each other in search of the Greece they dream of based on political ideology, that lonely waiter is looking for his own homeland who is none other than the woman he fell in love with young and never forgot. This is the ideogram of the book: the concept of the personal Ithaca we have within us. After all, everything in life is a journey. Sometimes difficult, sometimes easy.
It’s a wonderful love story. Mr. Aristides and his Eudoxia fall in love in the early years of the twentieth century. Their lives are haunted by this great unfulfilled love, which, in contrast to the speeds developed by our age, lasts through time. It sounds strange, like a kind of prayer to humanity, to goodness, to innocence…
That was the goal right from the start. A kind of prayer to the only God who can unite us all: humanity, emotion. The “Nightingales of Silence” can be characterized as a love novel, a social novel, a period piece, and even a war novel. But I wrote it as an appeal to goodness and innocence.
However, the book is a breathless read, despite the fact that it is voluminous. Do issues such as text pacing concern you equally, in addition to research?
Yes. Very much. The pace. The structure. The musicality. Having a ripple in the text, knowing when to go up, when to go down, when to give tension, when to rest the reader. For me the architecture of the book is as important as the writing. Nothing is left to chance. It is 540 pages worked point by point.
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