Even in Paradise: On Ersi Sotiropoulos

There is a notion that in paradise, all is devoid of suffering, that everything is perfectly expressed. Whatever is desired is transmitted flawlessly, as easily as the movements of the fingers, with as great control, that there is an impeccable command of want. The problem with this notion is that, in paradise there could, in fact, be something to desire.

For contemporary Greek novelist Ersi Sotiropoulos, desire and paradise are inextricable. And desire is always emblematic of death. The human and the animal collide, the mundane mingles with the sensual in a landscape that is both uncanny and yet largely realist in style.

In a story translated in English as The Exterminator, a writer who has retreated to an unnamed Greek island is plagued by an infestation of rats. In frustration, she puts out poison, but finds this only makes them hungrier, more virulent. When she invites an older man, a fumigator, to deal with the problem, she quickly discovers he is the greatest lover she has ever had. But his desire only deepens his hunger. And the poison in the house contaminates his appetite. Paradise is polluted with desire. Desire is equated with death.

If a motto runs through Sotiropoulos’s work, it is that old Latin epigraph.

et in arcadia ego

Even in paradise, I am here.

But her worlds at first appearance are far from paradisiacal. They exist within a very European sense of crisis, of decline, of lingering chaos. Though the severe economic recession in the recent and historical consciousness of Greece is always on the periphery of the stories she tells, the anxiety that permeates her work goes beyond this, towards a more ubiquitous element of twenty-first century dread.

Her collections Ο βασιλιάς του φλίπερ (The King of Pinball) and Αχτίδα στο σκοτάδι (Ray in The Dark) were translated together as Landscape with Dog by American scholar Karen Emmerich in 2010, though they were published natively in 1998 and 2005, respectively. The previously mentioned story, The Exterminator is found in this collection.

But more recently, her 2015 novel Τι μενει απο τη νυχτα, was rendered into English, named What’s Left of The Night, and published in 2018.

At the end of a six-week travelling period, the Alexandrian poet C.P. Cavafy visits Paris. It is the year 1897, his brother accompanying him. Paris, that symbol of artistic hope, or equally, artistic despair, as ambivalent a paradise as any for the developing Constantine P. Cavafy, nascent in his formation as a poet as much as as a human being, with human desires, same-sex desires criminalised by European society, though always on the alluring periphery of the city’s erotic world. This is the story Sotiropoulos examines in What’s Left of The Night. The brothers remain in the French capital for only three days.

What Cavafy discovers, and Ersi Sotiropoulos again portrays, is this vitally modern collision. The conscious need for order clashing with desire, the desire to realise the very fantasy that this order brings about, the fantasy of the collapse of order. For so much of the novel, Cavafy lingers in this middle-world between order and desire, in a limbo of unrealised, and therefore protected, erotic and artistic hope. Sotiropoulos suggests that what is hoped for does not always match what is desired, and that the two states are often incompatible. Out of the clash of these two states comes the essence of creativity.

Sotiropolous probes the thoughts of the fictional Cavafy to come close to what the real Cavafy may have felt. This is not historical fiction or biography, this is strictly a novel, and the protagonist’s thoughts are rarely comforting. On Rimbaud, he meditates:

The question, he thought, is who can produce better poetry? The one with the quiet life, bent timidly over his desk, his mind fired by desires and the most wild imaginings, fantasies he knows will never become reality, or the other, who rushes at life with gusto, who taunts life like a foolhardy warrior, daring it, betting his very existence in a game of heads or tails?

And it is of course, Constantine Cavafy who fits the second role. Whatever criticisms can be made about the liberties, indulgences or inaccuracies the novel may sometimes deal in, the work is a fine introduction to the singularly defined poetics of Cavafy, for whom the self was the only possible universal, and the universal the only possible self. The novel is both a primer to his work, his life, his times, and to the mythical world of fin-de-siècle Paris, where even here, in this literary paradise, an unease hangs fixed in the amber of history, in the fictions of time.