Koula [Paperback]

Koula treats Dimitri like a little mother, warning him not to dress so casually when it's cold outside. He's like a little boy in some ways, she thinks to herself as, mentally, she restrains herself from reaching out and touching the goosebumps on his bare arm.

Koula has two children herself, girls of ten and thirteen. Dimitri's only 21 herself, but he seems to be attracted to her. What's a woman to do? Little by little Koula finds herself giving in, as she sees him daily. Once she catches him crying. It's absurd, but she feels twinges of love for him! Author Menes Koumantareas knows women from the inside out, or so it seems, how would I know? She, Koula, seems real to me, and her quandaries seem like those of a person entering middle age and, perhaps, hoping for one last tryst with life itself. "Girls of my age bore me to death," he confesses, although she's seem him with her own eyes huddled intimately with a young girl. Somehow she believes him. This is sort of a Greek version of Summer of 42 or Brief Encounter.

Anyone who's been on the Athenian underground will understand the intimate allegory Koumantareas proposes, first the progress between stations, cutting deep through the belly of the ancient city, and the sexual impulse growing ever stronger with the subway's ambient musics. Out on the street, "a few bitter-orange trees gave out a faint, wintry scent."

Translator Kay Cicellis provides us with a open sesame into Koumantareas' electrically charged universe. She is especially good at catching the mood of his story. How it veers from comic to melancholy, sometimes by the end of a sentence. I won't spoil the story for you any more, just urge you to give it a try. Friends in Greece have long urged me to try reading some of Menes' Koumantareas's work. He is like the Reynolds Price of Greece, they say. Now I can, and you can too.

Koumantareas is considered to be a leading Greek novelist, having won the Greek equivalent of the National Book Award 3 times. This short novel, published by The Dalkey Archive, is about a charming love affair between an older conservative woman and a younger bohemian in Athens. They purposefully cross each other's path daily in their commute from school/work. At first the characters notice each other; there is a sense of tension. They strike up conversation and the young man is quickly takes her to a bohemian bar. They end up in a secluded apartment for a passionate love affair.

This novel is stylistically moody and makes you wonder about all of those awkward glances you get from those you see everyday but will never speak to.

Koula. Menis Koumandareas. Translated by Kay Cicellis

KOULA(1978), a novella, is set in modern-day Athens. Its principal characters and only direct speakers are introduced as "a mature woman" and "a young man", who habitually encounter each other on an underground, commuter train, get to know each other, and glide into an affair. Koula, married to Haris, has two, nearly adolescent daughters in a nice suburb. An accountant by day, she laments the "dreary" routine and habit of work, home, and family, but by story's end relishes its secure familiarity .

Between the first and last is the relationship of Koula and Dimitri, which brings out surprising emotional and physical changes in Koula. Through their closeness and separation, she becomes aware of a humanitarian connection to self and others--coworkers, family, strangers--and to world events. Her future will be "a long, arduous odyssey"(88), in other words, both uneventful and eventful.