A Room in Athens: A
Memoir
by Frances Karlen
Santamaria
Tatra
Press LLC
ISBN- 978-0-9898352-9-9
Softcover; 174 pgs; $15.00
ISBN- 978-0-9898352-9-9
Softcover; 174 pgs; $15.00
Review by Karen
Chutsky originally for IndependentPublisher.com
They say artists hover a
bit outside of life; too obsessed with observing, contemplating and recording
their impressions of it to be one hundred percent involved in
it.
Such is the pensive
writing style of Frances Karlen Santamaria, best described through the words of
her adoring son: “...she dashed off written watercolor like impressions of
people fresh and literary…some sympathetically rendered others verge on harsh
caricature.”
And what better subject
to render into vivid pictures than her first foreign sojourn at the age of 27,
during the midst of the mad dash of the early 60’s in America to soak in the
“Zorba the Greek” experience of Greece and other exotic European ports of call,
“where your consciousness is stretched each second with total
attention.”
Foreign travel has
always been a rite of intellectual passage for the class of thinking Americans
to which Frances and her husband belonged.
The synopsis: In 1964,
off Frances went with Arno, the Holiday magazine writer and aspiring
novelist at her side -- and soon to emerge son inside her for part of the ride
-- a child who would become for the last three months of her adventure a
gurgling focus more intriguing than that of the life around her in their last
and longest stop, Athens, Greece.
What I find wonderful
about diaries and memoirs are the raw emotions and images of life that so often
become the dulled and manipulated stuff of fiction, written by those trying to
capture the sparks of lives lived by someone else. Frances’ writing offers up
her experience like a plate of steak tartar.
Though the book is
billed as a comparison of the realities of Greek life versus the idyll of Greece
– “eh” -- the main storyline bubbling through her memoir is purely the journey
of a woman on the cusp of becoming a mother, as she quips; “the one major event
of our grown lives for which we do not have our hair done,” choosing to have her
baby at a natural childbirth clinic in Greece; thought of as a rather dubious
thing to do at the time, while coming to grips with marrying a man “with a
built-in mistress”: a writing career. She describes it succinctly thus; “he
seems about to write something…but whatever it is hasn’t emerged …and he lives
around an unseen but felt iceberg lodged in his mind.” Her husband seemed to
place a higher value on his own freedom to experience the night life of Greek
tavernas with other young sponges dissecting the novelty of Greek life -- while
his wife was sequestered to “a room in Athens.”
To quote one of those
famous Greek philosophers she admired so, “Without strife, there can be no
greatness.” And in the end, France’s wonderfully potent writing speaks its
greatness in this memoir clearest to women, through the unique episode of life
she and a handful of Greek woman experienced in their journey into
motherhood.
Most notable are her
vivid sketches of places and peoples, palpable as if one muddled through the
grand tour of Europe -- though sadly, her diary of the months spent touring
England, Italy, Spain, and Yugoslavia, pre-birth are reduced to a few
paragraphs. They would have blasted open the tunnel of the book into a grander
adventure. Hopefully, they will someday be compiled and edited into what would
be a very worthwhile book.
Some vibrant
excerpts:
“At twilight, the sky
above Athens turns orange and the light in the streets takes on a purple tones
of the bare mountains that semicircle the town. Men sat drinking in cafes where
women never went. The city had awakened from its long afternoon nap and
Athenians were out in their numbers, going back to work, shopping, strolling.
Soldiers―with custom-made uniforms hugging their bodies-- passed by in the twos
and threes of soldiers everywhere, there were many of the righteous priests in
their black robes, their hair braided in a knot in the back like a matador’s.
They had , without exception, the air of smug
landowners…”
“Boys in white aprons
ran by, swinging tripodic, long handled trays of coffee and ouzo--messengers of
the Greek carry-out. Occasionally, a cart rumbled by with a handsome young man
standing up driving the horse, so like a charioteer I had to
smile.”
The greatest compliment
I can pay her is that many of her fecund commentaries on life were just as
poignant and literary as those penned by the great philosophers of Greek
antiquity she so admired.
And though the reality
of her Greek cultural adventure felt far short of her fantasy, as she realized
“Ancient Greece is a state of the spirit only to which plane fare can’t take
you,” the birth of her firstborn son did not disappoint.
A Room in
Athens or the more befitting
title from its first publication, Joshua, First Born, exposes just the
tip of the iceberg lodged in the mind of the very talented writer, Frances
Karlen Santamaria
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