Orthokostá

September 19, 2016
Appearing for the first time in English, this chilling, arresting novel (first published in 1994) complicates the once-proud legacy of Greek resistance to Nazi occupation. Using a cascade of voices, Valtinos dramatizes the chaos that erupted between state-backed Battalions and the Communist party once “it was becoming clear the Germans were losing the war.” After the Communists burn the Peloponnesian town of Kastrí, its residents are interned at the Orthokostá Monastery. One survivor remembers being “pushed inside like cattle” and having the soles of his feet beaten with “clubs or knotted rope.” The loyalists are equally deplorable: one rebel surrenders to the Nazis, only to be handed over to a Battalion that begins randomly executing Communists in a courthouse basement (“They killed them. They killed them right before our eyes”). It can be a struggle to parse the constantly shifting perspectives and politics of Valtinos’s novel, but that’s only because the memories of the events he describes are as contested as the facts themselves. “It began in 1943. No. It began in 1940,” one man says as he struggles to trace the roots of the conflict. Another demurs: “I could never get to the bottom of things.” It is only through layering these individual stories together that a full picture of the Civil War can emerge, one that allows for reflection. “Why did we do all that?” a former soldier wonders, before answering himself, too quickly: “For revenge, that’s why.”