Something Will Happen, You'll See
A Tale of Polygamy
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- $17.99
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- $17.99
Publisher Description
Raymond Carver meets William Faulkner in this “pitch-perfect” short story collection that captures the hopes and fears of working-class Greeks during the country’s economic crisis (Los Angeles Review of Books)
Ikonomou’s stories convey the plight of those worst affected by the Greek economic crisis—laid-off workers, hungry children. In the urban sprawl between Athens and Piraeus, the narratives roam restlessly through the impoverished working-class quarters located off the tourist routes.
Everyone is dreaming of escape: to the mountains, to an island or a palatial estate, into a Hans Christian Andersen story world. What are they fleeing? The old woes—gossip, watchful neighbors, the oppression and indifference of the rich—now made infinitely worse. In Ikonomou’s concrete streets, the rain is always looming, the politicians’ slogans are ignored, and the police remain a violent, threatening presence offstage. Yet even at the edge of destitution, his men and women act for themselves, trying to preserve what little solidarity remains in a deeply atomized society, and in one way or another finding their own voice. There is faith here, deep faith—though little or none in those who habitually ask for it.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In Ikonomou's timely novel, the human fallout of the Greek economic recession is writ large. In these 15 stories of poverty and institutional disfunction, Ikonomou's heroes the laboring, often-unemployed masses crushed by debt and hunger seek solace from their debilitating realties in memory ("Charcoal Mustache"), dreams ("Foreign. Exotic."), and liquor ("The Blood of the Onion"), only to come up against an implacable and corrupt system that erodes their humanity, breaking up families and repossessing property. Concerned with the bottom rungs of the social ladder, pieces such as "Mao," about a young, cat-loving vigilante in a crime-infested neighborhood, or "Placard and Broomstick," in which a grocery stocker mounts a feeble protest against unsafe working conditions, cover an astonishing range. Then there's the centerpiece, a daring experiment called "The Things They Carried," which references the famous Tim O'Brien story (and book) of the same name, except that Ikonomou's peasants carry nothing but unpaid bills and "the weight of their weakness, the weight of time, of the sicknesses that ate at their bodies." These stories add up to a panorama of the human spirit under siege and a searing indictment of the failures to reform the Greek infrastructure.
