Christos Ikonomou. Good Will Come From the Sea. Translated by Karen Emmerich. Brooklyn, NY: Archipelago Books, 2019. 255 pages. $18.00.
“Becoming poor isn’t what breaks you. What breaks you is remembering that you didn’t used to be poor,” says one of the narrators in Christos Ikonomou’s newest collection, Good Will Come From the Sea. Set on an unnamed island in the Aegean, circa 2012-2013, Ikonomou delves into themes of poverty, exploitation and the struggle to find new footing in the wake of Greece’s debt crisis. Each of the four linked stories is narrated by a different voice, sometimes echoing each other in their witty, sharp-tongued expressions of Greece’s complicated relationship with Europe and the effects international monetary decisions have on individual lives. These stories explore how the lack of financial stability leads to even greater complications and tragedies.
Ikonomou’s island resembles a pair of handcuffs, “one bigger than the other, as if made for someone with one atrophied arm.” At the core of each story is tension between the island’s inhabitants: the locals who have always lived on the island and a group of Athenians in financial exile. The Athenians have come to the island looking for a safe harbor and a new beginning, but their ideas often fall into opposition with the island’s old ways. It’s difficult to say which side views the other with more suspicion, but the exiled Athenians have the most to lose in their repeated battles for a piece of the dwindling financial pie. The locals refer to the Athenians as foreigners, an idea that might be confusing to some readers at first. It’s perplexing to some of the characters, as well; after all, how can anyone be considered a foreigner in his own country? As one character explains, “If you’re in need, if you’re on the outside, you’re a foreigner everywhere.”
Ikonomou has explored themes of poverty in his past work, most notably in his previous collection, Something Will Happen, You’ll See (Archipelago, 2016), which won Greece’s Best Short Story Collection State Award (read the KR Review here). Good Will Come From the Sea has been described specifically as an elegy of the financial crisis. As true as that is, the island that links these stories is also an allegory of contemporary Greece and the conflicted love-hate relationship many Greeks have with their country, a complicated emotional landscape certainly not limited to the Aegean. “This island is a prison, and the sea is the bars,” we are told. Often, the island serves as a metaphor for pre-crisis Greece, organized by political and financial corruption and maintained by violence. Greece is also presented as a political and cultural island unto itself, not necessarily belonging anywhere in the world. The question is not only whether Greece can benefit from membership in the European Union, but whether Greece is truly a part of Europe at all, sitting as it always has in the crossroads of history and geography. Stavros, who narrates the final story in Good Will Come From the Sea, says, “Drop that line about Europe already. What Europe? Europe only ever existed on maps and in books. And don’t start in on Plato and Aristotle and the Romans. We’re talking about now, and about normal people. What do I have to do with a Dane, a Swede, a Czech?”
Stories of the poor and desperate are plentiful in literature, but these stories feel fresh. This can be credited, in part, to the tone of Ikonomou’s writing, which is often conversational and always urgent. With each narrator, it’s crucial to pass his story on to the reader, often as the narrator is wrestling to interpret the story to himself.
And yet, as contemporary as these stories are, there’s a deep knowledge of history always present to inform the modern tale. Lazaros, the third narrator, reminds the reader that the island, and by default, Greece, has countless wounds inflicted over centuries from the Saracens, Franks, Venetians, Turks, Italians, and Germans. “Wounds from so many knives,” Lazaros says, recalling Greece’s past. But even this note from history is there to provide context for the present when he says of those wounds: “The deepest ones, the ones that hurt the most, are the ones we made ourselves. A brother’s knife cuts twice as deep as a stranger’s. And we’re still at it today.”
Of all the book’s narrators, Lazaros is the most philosophical, and probably the best at summing up the financial crisis and its emotional effects. While walking around the island at night in search for his son, Lazaros says, “I don’t know what’s worse, to love your country because you’re ripping it off or to hate it because you can’t do that anymore, and I think how now that the money is gone we have to find something else to keep us together, but I can’t think of what, I can’t see that there’s anything left, there’s just nothing, nothing, nothing.”
The greatest tragedy—and simultaneously the most courageous aspect—of these stories is how often the characters refuse to give up in the face of that “nothing, nothing, nothing.” The island is unforgiving, but many of Ikonomou’s characters remain defiant, refusing to give up hope for their future, regardless of the fact that the future is as amorphous as the sea surrounding their handcuff-shaped islands. If there is indignity in impoverishment and loss, then there is dignity in the struggle to rise above what brings one low.
Perhaps this is where American readers will most identify with Good Will Come From the Sea. Although America has enjoyed relative economic stability in recent years, the Greek financial crisis echoes America’s modern political identity crisis and the essential civil war we find ourselves in at the ballot box and the dinner table. Whether it’s economics or politics, we, too, are constantly being forced to redefine our identities and to renegotiate our moral codes. The Greeks are not alone in questioning who we are by the way we treat those around us, especially the least of those living on our metaphorical islands. Through one of his narrators, Ikonomou says, “Didn’t Christ say it, too? You have to lose your soul in order to save it. That’s how it is with us, too. In order for us to be saved, we first have to be lost. In order to save Greece, to save our country, first we have to lose it.” Therein lies the hope in Christos Ikonomou’s work: that after losing so much, maybe even after losing everything, we will still find a way to save ourselves.
