Όνειρο στο κύμα
Η φαρμακολύτρια

"Whatever she had done, then or now, she had done it all for the best"
By sally tarbox on 8 January 2017
Format: Paperback
Short (127p) but powerful read, following an elderly woman staying with her daughter and her sick newborn granddaughter. She thinks back over her life, a slave to her father then her husband , the fight to make ends meet, the struggle to get a dowry together for her daughters, without which they'd remain old maids. And the pain of losing her sons - two emigrated and were never heard of again, one is in prison... Isn't it better for everyone if her daughter is disencumbered of this new arrival?
But Hadoula's logic means she keeps going, seeking to 'help' other families cursed with daughters, culminating in an exciting and beautifully written tale. Bringing the scenery of the Greek Islands to life (the author was a native of Skiathos), this is simply written but most compelling. ( )

The setting is so exotic, and even the multiplicity of names, as to be almost distracting, but the story is engaging while at the same time having a strong sense of inevitability. This is perhaps part of what the European novelist and critic Gabriel Josipovici (disclosure: for whom I do www.gabrieljosipovici.org) means when he said (as reported on the back cover), "It is books such as The Murderess which remind us of the miraculous nature of fiction." ( )

Hadoula, "the murderess" of this book, is a 60 year old woman living in a small village on one of the Greek islands. She has led a down-trodden life. As the novel opens she is watching over her newborn grandaughter, who is seriously ill, while the child's mother sleeps.

"As the old woman rocked the child, she could have sung the whole saga of her sufferings over the cradle. In the course of the previous nights she had really lost track of reason in the catelogue of her sufferings. The whole of her life, with its futility and its emptiness and hardness, had come into her mind in pictures and scenes, and in visions."

As she reviews the difficulties of her life, her brain "began to smoke," and she almost unthinkingly suffocates the newborn. The baby's death is attributed to natural causes. However, suspicions begin to arise when other girls die.

This novel quietly conveys the reality of a woman in a remote poor community a century or so ago, its fishermen, shepherds, and other peasants. It also magnificently and believabley reveals the mind of a woman, who feeling herself trapped, acts in a way that is horrifice and difficult to understand.

3 1/2 stars ( )

At the beginning of this intense novella, Hadoula, a 60-ish woman living on a small Greek island in what appears to be the late 19th century, is watching her ailing infant granddaughter while her daughter sleeps. As she watches, she mentally reviews her life, and that of her parents and family, a life of hardship, especially for girls and women. Life has improved in some respects, in that the brigands and the Turks are gone and peace reigns on the island, but the men and women still have to scratch out a living from the rocky earth and the ever-present sea. Many of the young men have left for America, and parents are left to somehow find husbands and dowries for their daughters. Sons disappear, some go to jail, and daughters are a burden. And, as she muses and dozes, Hadoula unconsciously makes a fateful decision that sets into motion the rest of the book.

What stands out for me in this story is the vivid depiction of a time and a place in which the residents know every inch of ground, every risky path across the rocks, and every hidden cave on their remote island, and in which the past is still present in ruined castles and chapels, family is central, and nature is always at hand. As the translator notes in his introduction to the edition I read, at the time Papadiamatis was writing, in the 1890s, the Greek islands were 50 times further behind Athens than Athens was behind Paris and London. Despite some qualms about dialect the translator sometimes uses the somewhat melodramatic nature of the story, I couldn't put this book down, especially as it builds to its not unexpected conclusion.