The Light and the Poverty

Dominic Amerena examines the enduring appeal of Greece and the destination novel.

By Dominic AmerenaMarch 7, 2025

• Fiction

• Cultural Studies

ONE DAY IN SUMMER, I took in the washing from the balcony of my flat in Central Athens. Wildfires had been raging on the outskirts of the city and I didn’t want my sheets to smell like smoke. All day, I’d been receiving messages from the government urging me to stay inside—messages, too, from visitors in town on their way to or from the islands, friends and friends-of, urging me out for a drink or a meal.

I paused to take in the view: an abandoned lot and a litter of inbred, cross-eyed cats, a street devoid of people, save for tourists and the unhoused, and that gauzy, yellow sky which I have grown to associate with summer in Greece. I went back inside, shut the windows, and returned to work on this essay, which began with a question I posed a few months prior, in the WhatsApp group for Salad Days, a reading series I run with my wife and a Greek writer and translator: “In the last 10 years, have more Greek novels been translated into English, or have there been more novels written by foreigners but set in Greece?”

Over the course of a few hours, we traded titles back and forth, before tallying up the results (dated here by their appearance in English):

Greeks: Amanda Michalopolou’s God’s Wife (2019) and Why I Killed My Best Friend (2014); Christos Chrissopoulos’s The Parthenon Bomber (2017); and Christos Ikonomou’s Good Will Come from the Sea (2019) and Something Will Happen, You’ll See (2016) (short stories but close enough).

Foreigners: Rachel Cusk’s Outline (2014), Katie Kitamura’s A Separation (2017), Cara Hoffman’s Running (2017), Andrew Durbin’s Skyland (2020), Hanna Johansson’s Antiquity (2024).

Partial Credit: Deborah Levy’s August Blue (2023), Megan Nolan’s Acts of Desperation (2021), Emmanuel Carrère’s Yoga (2022), Andrew Lipstein’s Last Resort (2022), all of which are written by foreigners but contain key sections set in Greece.

We were surprised by the results of our admittedly inexhaustive survey: we knew few contemporary Greeks had made it into English, the linguistic coin of the realm (here and in the writing world more generally), but we’d been only dimly aware of quite how many foreigners had made it in into Greece.

¤

“[A]ll I want is a destination, an end point,” thinks the unnamed writer-narrator of Durbin’s Skyland, on his way to Patmos to find a portrait of the French writer Hervé Guibert. From Death in Venice to Jeff in Venice, travel has long been grist for literary fiction, but what happens when a place like Greece is treated as nothing but a destination in the novel, when the authentic Mediterranean experience of Greek literature is rejected in favor of the mediated version?

The destination novels in this essay present Greece through the lens of a visitor’s Ray-Bans, which has little to do with the actual place. These literary novels revel in the existential embarrassment of the tourist, “an ugly human being,” in Jamaica Kincaid’s immortal words, and their narrators would be the first to agree. And yet, despite their ambivalence, these novels reinforce the idea of Greece as a place to visit but seldom to stay, let alone to live.

In Kitamura’s A Separation, an unnamed translator searches for her writer-husband at a luxury resort in Mani. In Johansson’s Antiquity, an unnamed journalist preys upon a Swedish teen on the island of Syros. In Cusk’s Outline, a barely named writer is wined and dined by the Athenian bourgeoisie. Cusk’s novel stands out for the page time it devotes to the lives of its Greek characters, upper-class though they might be. In the other destination novels, the narrators seem stuck in the gilded cage of tourism; the few Greek “characters” lurk in the background as if afraid of disturbing their guests.

Published in English translation in the United States last year, Antiquity represents the most recent spate of destination novels, a spare, beguiling book described as “a moody exploration of loneliness and obsession against the backdrop of an arrestingly beautiful Greek island.” In these destination novels, Greece is the amphitheater where the drama of the literary bourgeoisie plays out: pederasty and bloody murder, hookups and breakups, writing workshops. Greece is seen but seldom heard. It’s pure setting. In a sense, it doesn’t exist. Instead of the brute economics of global tourism, the dialectic of the served and the servers, these novels cover the usual literary terrain: desire, transgression, consumption, ennui. The hardwood floor has been substituted for a marble one, takeout replaced by a taverna spread, but Greece is only ever a background on which foreign writers can project their concerns and obsessions.

¤

This is nothing new. For hundreds of years, we—broadly speaking, these books’ Anglophone-ish audience—have been reading too much into Greece. There were the philhellenes, like Nietzsche, who believed the ancients to be “the only people of genius in the history of the world.” Still lionized in Greece, Lord Byron spent his life savings, and ultimately his life, fighting in the Greek War of Independence, seeking to preserve the faded image of antiquity: “Fair Greece! sad relic of departed worth! / Immortal, though no more; though fallen, great!”

A veneration for antiquity was a linchpin of Romanticism and countless artists, historians, and philosophers who refashioned ancient Greece in their image, equating it with a timelessness and universality that still persists today.

The word “classic” comes from the Latin verb “classicus,” and was used to distinguish high-class writers and students from their “proletarius” counterparts. In the modern age, knowledge of and interest in ancient Greek and Latin became a stand-in for elitism and snobbishness, and the philhellenes often saw themselves as the inheritors and protectors of Greece’s history, language and culture, looking down upon the people who actually lived there.

See the ongoing debate regarding the return of the Elgin Marbles. Even as late as the 21st century, Lord Elgin’s infamous theft has been presented in Britain as a form of conservation. “Had Elgin not brought the Marbles back to London,” One archaeologist wrote in The Guardian, shockingly recently, that “they would have been badly damaged in Athens, and possibly destroyed. […] When the Greeks can demonstrate that they too have done an admirable job of caring for the Marbles in Athens then, perhaps, we can discuss a loan.”

The ancient world is a source of pride for many Greeks, but for many others it’s a fig leaf for the state and Greece’s visitors (36 million in 2024) to ignore the problems of today. In his book of aphorisms, Nikos Dimou writes that “Any race believing itself to be descended from the ancient Greeks would be automatically unhappy.” Much contemporary Greek thought explores the paradox of the nation’s past, presented simultaneously as a gift and a burden. “I woke with this marble head in my hands,” writes Nobel winner Giorgos Seferis in the poem “Mythistorema.” “It exhausts my elbow and I don’t know where to put it down.” The titular incident at the center of Chrissopoulos’s The Parthenon Bomber literalizes the instability of Greek national identity, in which Greeks are pulled between veneration and rejection of their so-called glorious heritage.

Nowadays, the ancient world is evoked to entice more tourists (a recent slogan was “Greece: All Time Classic”), though it has seldom been that anodyne. Equating Greece with antiquity was a common practice during the midcentury military junta to legitimate their brutal rule. As one historian wrote: “One of the most unlovely aspects of that unlovely regime was its tedious and hackneyed insistence on the special place of Greece as heir to a glorious ancient civilisation.” Indeed the “ancient” look of downtown Athens was itself a product of Cold War propaganda. Many well-known ancient sites in the city were renovated under the Marshall Plan to highlight that “democracy had originated in a NATO member state.”

Besides the odd academic rambling about the American School of Archaeology, nowadays the only people who connect ancient and modern Greece are tour guides, Fulbright scholars, and fascists. Greece’s political rulers, New Democracy and Syriza, have ushered in an era of deregulation, gentrification, and property speculation, or “Greece 2.0,” as the current prime minister, Kyriakos Mitsotakis, described it, before an embarrassing wiretapping scandal (think Watergate, except with no consequences for the tappers). But the far-right “political” parties, Greeks for the Fatherland (now rebranded as National Party–Greeks), Golden Dawn, and its modern iteration, Spartans (who won 12 parliamentary seats in the last elections—whelp!), all borrow liberally from ancient iconography invoking so-called warrior ancestors and frame their violent xenophobia (named, of course, after another ancient Greek) as a way for them to make Greece great again.

Johansson’s Antiquity follows a vampiric Swedish journalist who travels with Helena, a famous artist who comes from old shipping money, and Olga, her teenage daughter, to their holiday house on Syros. A black hole of need, the narrator attaches herself to the mother (“I thought I could become Helena’s daughter, Olga’s proxy, a better version of her, one much more worthy of love”) before moving on to Olga, savoring the name with a nod to Nabokov: “I tasted it on my own tongue, the tongue that whipped the palate over the g and turned it into a k.” But this is a very Scandinavian Humbertina, her desire lurking beneath the surface of Johansson’s prose. And yet, like Humbert, the narrator is just as concerned with justifying and rationalizing her transgressions; this novel takes the form of a mea culpa, and ancient Greece is a crucial part of her alibi.

The narrator sees the ancient world wherever she looks; a subway car exists “side by side with a time that was different but also mine, the history I’d been taught was the foundation of everything.” When she arrives in Ermoupoli, the capital of Syros, the town is in “the shape of an amphitheater” while “Helena’s house was wedged between an alley and a ruin.” One presumes it is the romantic myopia of the luxury tourist, but it quickly becomes something more sinister. “It had been some kind of desire, still unknown to me at the time, that brought me to Ermoupoli,” the narrator thinks, before invoking fate, that most Greek of words, to frame her attraction to and seduction of Olga. She thinks of “prehistory, that dusky, wordless time,” to give herself permission to act: “we were in the midst of something eternal […] time was bending around me to make space for us.” Crudely, unconsciously, the narrator draws on the philhellene idea of premodern morality (see: pederasty), abstracting herself from the immediacy of the act.

¤

There are countless examples of Greek destination novels from the 20th century, typified by the work of Patrick Leigh Fermor and the Durrells. Some later works capture the expat existence exceedingly well, Don DeLillo’s The Names (1982) and Lynne Tillman’s Cast in Doubt (1992) among them. But I want to write about two novelists in particular: Andrea Dworkin and Henry Miller, who both abhorred paragraph breaks, wrote with a fizzing, libidinal energy and penned Greek destination novels 50 years apart.

Miller’s 1941 travelogue, The Colossus of Maroussi, is pure philhellenism: “The image of Greece, faded though it be, endures as an archetype of the miracle wrought by the human spirit. A whole people, as the relics of their achievements testify, lifted themselves to a point never before and never since attained.” Dworkin’s 1990 autofiction work Mercy is only slightly less gushing. She recounts living in Corfu in 1966 (just before the junta took power) as “a place touched by whatever gods there ever were, anyone can see that […] I’m almost wanting to kiss the ground. I’ve never loved somewhere before. I’m living on land that breathes. Even the city, cement and stone bathed in ancient light, breathes.”

The books are set before the breakout of World War II and the Vietnam War, and both writers saw Greece as a refuge from American imperialism. They continually compare Walt Whitman, in Miller’s view “the only great writer we ever had,” with the average Greeks on the street, who serve as antidotes to “civilization and its spawn of cultured souls.” For her part, Dworkin imagines that Whitman “would come to [Crete] because it has his passion and his courage and the nobility of simple people and a shocking, brilliant, extreme beauty that keeps the blood boiling and the heart alive.” This attitude results in some interesting ideas about the straitened circumstances of the people Miller and Dworkin encounter. When asked why he’s quite so fond of Greece, Miller replies “The light and the poverty.” Dworkin meanwhile marvels that “if there is running hot water you are in the house of a millionaire. If you are just in a rich house, the people heat the water up in a kettle or a pot.”

Miller’s titular Colossus is Giorgos “George” Katsimbalis, an upper-class intellectual, who lived and studied in Paris, and helped introduce modernism to Greece in the 1930s. It’s an irony lost on Miller that he is so enamored with the poverty of Greece, with a French-speaking scion for a tour guide. This equation of poverty with simplicity and even nobility is of course as old as colonialism itself. But writers like Miller and Dworkin were determined to see in Greece what they wanted: a nation of illiterate Whitmans, where the jaded materialist could wash away modernism’s stink—even if the shower was cold.

¤

The contemporary destination novelist is in more of a bind. Orientalism is out, at least in its overt form, and nowadays no foreigner would make authorial pronouncements on the nature of the Greek (or any other nation’s) soul and character. And so, perhaps for the sake of self-preservation, most destination novelists ignore the Greeks entirely.

“[I]t was the first time I had spoken to anyone in Gerolimenas apart from the staff at the hotel,” thinks A Separation’s narrator, marooned at a luxury resort in Mani, awaiting her cheating husband’s return. In destination novels, the only Greeks you’re likely to meet are taxi drivers, hoteliers, and waiters. These Greeks often have a “superb, statue-like countenance” (Cusk) or “something dreamlike and ancient about them, solemn and altar-like” (Johansson). Or else they might have features that are “very expressive” (Kitamura) and wear “disheveled blue uniforms […] mov[ing] slowly between tables, without any sense of urgency” (Durbin). Write what you know, I suppose, and it’s certainly an improvement on Dworkin’s effort: “An Oriental cast to his face, [which] is like an old photograph [or] an exotic Russian saint, without the suffering but with many secrets.” In contemporary destination novels, Greece has been reduced from a subject to a setting, a sun-kissed backdrop upon which the visitor can project. Durbin’s Skyland, for instance, contains dual fantasies: a spurious connection with the ancient world (“the stone soft and warm from the countless hands who have touched it”), alongside the desire for a frictionless vacation experience, by the end of which he had merely “stood around. Ate a little. Swam.” These novels often seem so petrified of saying the wrong thing about Greece that they stick to the fleeting impressions of the casual observer, there not for a long—nor, it turns out, a good—time.

Pulp’s song “Common People” depicts a working-class lad’s revenge against a Greek heiress, who in real life became the future wife of Yanis Varoufakis, Syriza’s heartthrob ex-economic minister, darling of Guardian readers the world over. “[E]verybody hates a tourist,” croons Jarvis Cocker in that immortal song, “especially one who thinks it’s all such a laugh.” The characters in destination novels are mostly far from laughing, though Durbin’s narrator has a pleasant enough time on Patmos, despite not finding Guibert’s painting.

Instead, these characters are wracked by anxiety about their status as the dreaded tourist, described in A Separation as “a person immersed in prejudice, whose interest was circumscribed, who admired the weathered faces and rustic manners of the local inhabitants.” Helena, the matriarch of Antiquity, is a stand-in for the deluded visitor who thinks she’s above the basest touristic impulses. She derides tourists in Syros who “sunbathe and swim” (though Helena does little else) and chides them for not knowing anything about the real Greece, “about the financial crisis, about the refugees.” And yet, the first Greek person described in the novel does not appear until page 102, a man with a bandaged foot and a limp, “sinewy and short” with a “testosterone look” (the real Greece indeed!). This absence is surely deliberate, a metonym for the hermetic insulation of luxury, in which the tourist, described in the novel as “a guest with bad taste,” can simultaneously be a part of and apart from the place they’re visiting.

Kitamura’s novel is a sort of tourist gothic, in which violence lurks outside the confines of the resort, emanating from the people and the landscape itself. The Mani countryside is “rotting”: “there is nothing but rocks, the place is a collection of rocks.” After a recent wildfire, “the vegetation had been decimated, replaced by mounds of burnt charcoal, a lunar landscape.” A nearby town is “entirely charmless, it was true there was nothing much to see.”

This is a telling reference to the fires that overwhelm Greece each year, but in this novel, they act more as a long foreshadowing for the husband’s murder, a mugging gone wrong, which the narrator eventually frames as “a stupid and anonymous death that could have taken place anywhere.” But, like the misdeeds of Antiquity’s narrator, this crime could only have happened in Greece, the site of retribution, for the husband’s having “slept with several women […] in Mani,” possibly at the hands of a taxi driver scorned (the narrator’s projection, not mine).

Perhaps it is retribution, too, for the very real violence of the touristic power differential—waiters wading into the sea up to their armpits to serve drinks, teachers living in cars on tourist islands, donkeys going rogue. Being a tourist in Greece is risky business now: 10 died from the heat in the summer of 2024. But it is the Greeks who suffer all year round. “They are too poor to escape the reality of their lives,” in the words of Kincaid, “and they are too poor to live properly in the place where they live, which is the very place you, the tourist, want to go.”

In destination novels, Greek characters often recede into the background, extras in someone else’s drama. Cusk’s Outline depicts a writer, Faye, who says and does little, while her Greek interlocutors (a businessman, an author, a publisher, and a classroom of amateur writers) deliver monologues about their children and marriages and the state of the publishing industry. The Greeks in this novel order food rather than serve it; they’re afforded the same narrative attention as Faye’s foreign speakers. One of Cusk’s Greek characters says that “writers need to hide in bourgeois life like ticks need to hide in an animal’s fur: the deeper they’re buried the better.” This is a refreshing change from the narratorial avoidance of other destination novels, where the Greek characters act almost as diligent super-hosts, facilitating the telling of the foreigners’ stories. In Outline, they belong to the drama of bourgeois existence, as narcissistic and ambitious and lonely as the other characters in the novel.

¤

Publishing in Greece is in a parlous state. Since the economic crisis of 2010, the number of titles published has dropped precipitously, large publishers and chain bookstores have gone under or broken up, and business has been further affected by the capital controls introduced during the crisis. There has been no funding for writing since the crisis and the arrival of brutal austerity measures imposed by the European Union and by Greece’s New Democracy party. Greek writers, like so many other workers, took on second (or third) jobs to make ends meet. The brutal economic reality is that, for years, a lot of Greek writers haven’t had the time or money to create work, let alone work that might appeal to foreign markets largely hostile to difference. With the announcement of the six-day work week in Greece, things aren’t likely to get better.

And yet despite, or perhaps because of, all the turmoil, a vibrant DIY scene has emerged, comprised of small presses, magazines, journals, limited editions, readings, panels, and independent bookshops. A thriving, marginal writing culture, because there is no center. An emerging tradition targeted toward Greeks rather than the foreign markets, which have remained indifferent at best and hostile at worst.

Perhaps one reason there is so little Greek writing in translation is that we expect Greek writers to be the simple avatars of austerity. Indeed, one British publisher admitted that translation is “often published on less of a literary basis and more on what might be thought of as a reportage one, like Greek novels addressing the economic crisis.” Varoufakis will always get foreign butts on seats for a symposium on austerity and the villainy of the EU.

Meanwhile Christos Ikonomou’s grimy social realism about the crisis has hit a nerve internationally, winning awards and receiving praise from writers such as Maggie Nelson, even as a Greek critic in these pages has suggested that his work “seems conspicuously merchandized for these voyeuristic Western readers.” Perhaps as a residue of Greece’s grand poetic tradition—from Homer to Cavafy—there has been more international interest in Greek poetry than prose, exemplified by the 2017 anthology Austerity Measures: The New Greek Poetry (also about the crisis, but still). But by and large, international readers have remained uninterested in the stories Greek writers are telling, especially if they don’t conform to the idea of “a country that is on its knees and dying a slow and agonising death,” in the words of one of Cusk’s interlocutors. “What good would it do to be a writer, a Greek writer?” mused Miller’s Colossus, back in 1941. “Nobody reads Greek. If a man can have a thousand readers here he’s lucky.” Things haven’t changed since the time Miller was writing about Greece, but then again, they have. In the 20th century, Greece produced two Nobel Prize winners in literature and eight more nominees, not to mention writers such as Margarita Karapanou, Margarita Liberaki, Antonis Samarakis, and Alexandros Papadiamantis who all enjoyed success in English. And yet the English Wikipedia page for Modern Greek Literature continues to lack a section devoted to writers publishing since 1999.

There’s some graffiti near my house that reads, “Tourists Enjoy Your Stay in the Cemetery of Europe.” I think the next great Greek novel will be about tourism, the lifeblood of the country, which is making it very sick, about the “ugly human being[s]” who descend every year to watch the country burn. Us, in other words. And when it comes, I hope the world will take notice.

¤

Featured image: Penguin edition cover of Henry Miller’s The Colossus of Maroussi.