North Of Ithaka
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5.0 • 2 Ratings
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- £3.99
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- £3.99
Publisher Description
Eleni Gage, a young journalist living in New York, leaves her Manhattan flat to return to the remote but beautiful Greek village of Lia in northern Greece and rebuild her ruined ancestral home. But this is not just another tale of quaint rustic DIY - the house was the scene of imprisonment and torture, and its ruins are stalked by the ghosts of the Greek Civil War.
The story is played out in the stunning mountainous landscape of Epiros, one of the least-visited regions of Europe. As Eleni becomes part of the village, her neighbours and the house come vividly to life while her own disasters, triumphs and self-discoveries are alternately poignant and hilarious. The cast of characters includes Eleni's formidable yet miniscule aunts - the thitsas, who fear that she will be eaten by wolves; her immigrant Albanian builders; and the residents of modern-day Lia, whose feelings about the rebuilding of a house where such terrible events took place are ambivalent at best.
Informed by her knowledge of Greece's folklore, literature, language and history, Eleni's story is unfailingly witty and wise. But beneath it all lie the indelible stains of a real-life Greek tragedy.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
When Gage decided to take a break from her magazine career in Manhattan to rebuild her ancestral home in a Greek village in 2002, her father's four sisters, who'd by then emigrated to Massachusetts, were not amused. They predicted she'd be killed by Albanians and eaten by wolves. Even worse, they feared she would invite the curse of their mother Gage's namesake who, in 1948, was arrested, imprisoned, tortured and executed by a firing squad for plotting her family's escape to the U.S. during the Greek civil war (Gage's father, Nicholas, chronicled these events in his 1983 bestseller, Eleni). In rebuilding her grandmother's ruined home, Gage hoped to reverse some of the devastation her grandmother's murder caused. Those familiar with Under the Tuscan Sun type expat tales won't be surprised when Gage becomes mired in massive amounts of bureaucratic red tape, but manages to fulfill her dream with the help of kind villagers. Her recounting of this odyssey is occasionally maudlin, but the scope of her rebuilding effort is Herculean enough to keep readers turning pages to see the finished product for themselves. Reconstruction of the original Gatzoyiannis home is overshadowed by the story's real meat: the building of a bridge between an American and her tough-as-nails roots. Photos.
