Review by Alexandros Plasatis of “Aeolia” by Ilias Venezis

Aeolia (Αιολική Γη) was first published in Greece in 1945, appeared in Britain in 1950, and came out in the States in 1957 as Beyond the Aegean.

Ten years ago I was living in Southampton, working in a factory, doing the night shifts. One morning I got back from work and found a parcel from Greece. I took it to bed with me, lit a cigarette, tore it open: there was a book inside, with a small note from the sender, a friend: ‘Venezis wrote many books, and I’ve read them all, but he had only to write Aeolia.’

I skipped the intro, began with the novel, read a bit. It was some sort of a novel in stories. It was good and I read on and found beauty on those pages. My body ached from the factory, but I made the pillow into a knot under my head and stayed with the little stories: the story of Ali the Moslem who was searching the world for the camel with the white head, of quiet Stephanos who was searching for perpetual motion, the story of the hunter with the yellow stars.

It was a boy and his sisters who met those strange characters on their grandparents’ big farm. None of them were aware of the war and the death that was coming, that very soon Greeks and Turks would kill each other once again and in 1922 ‘the waters of Smyrna would be choked in dead bodies.’ It was peaceful there, in the wooded mountains of Aeolia, Asia Minor, and the tall wall around the farm was built with azure stones and made the farm look like a welcoming castle.

The boy and his sisters saw many passing travellers who rested at the farm – ‘there were Jews, Armenians, Turks, Christians, beggars, nobles, peddlers, the sick.’ But the little ones knew when a real traveller had come:

that is, someone who had stories to tell, dressed in strange clothes, bringing with him perhaps a little madness or some peddler’s wares to stir our curiosity and imagination, spreading before us the fresh pages of the world’s destiny. Then we all ran to find the traveller, to fuss over him and give him milk and eggs; and having bribed him sufficiently, we gathered around him and waited. Then, slowly, the pages turned. They turned and revealed to us that beyond external resemblances, beyond joy and misery, there was another power, as urgent as fire, uniting the destinies of all men: the pursuit of passion, the need for suffering.

     
When I woke up in the evening, I called the factory and told them I was sick. I stayed in bed and finished Aeolia and felt as if I had drunk sweet red wine. The writing was simple, the sentences were sometimes long and melodious and sometimes short and rhythmic, and the man who wrote them knew how to write.

Since then I moved to other English towns and lived in many houses, and somehow and somewhere the book was lost or maybe lent and never returned, and I didn’t give it much thought. But it came back to me again, in Leicester, in the library where I happen to work now, and they say that this library has a million books. I was shelving one evening in the literature section, up on the third floor, and as I was putting a book back on the shelves, there it was, sweet little Aeolia, on the last but bottom shelf. I pulled it out and checked: translated into English by E. D. Scott-Kilvert, intro by Lawrence Durrell. I found a quiet spot in between the shelves, got a footstool and took a seat. And hidden from customers and supervisors, I began again, I read on, on and on, and, yeah, the beauty and the magic were still there.

About the reviewer
Alexandros Plasatis lives in Leicester and had short stories published in Overheard: Stories to Read Aloud (2012), Unthology 6 (2015), and Crystal Voices: Ten Years of Crystal Clear Creators (2015).

Review by Jennifer Morris of "Without Makeup and Other Stories" by Hannah Stevens

Hannah Stevens' pamphlet is available from Crystal Clear Creator's website

Each one of this collection of six short stories left me wanting to know more about its characters. Stevens tells us little about what lies on the surface of her protagonists but so much about their inner depth. She does this without sentimentality, refusing to tell us how to feel, and demonstrating a respect for her reader.

The pieces are laced with beautiful prose, allowing the reader to see the world in new ways. In The Noises of Being Torn, Stevens describes the emptiness of a collapsing relationship in the line, "You can’t tie someone to nothing and expect them to stay." At other times, she shows a deep understanding of human emotion and behaviour, describing how the cheated-on woman in the story decides "to bargain with the calendar for a bit more time" as people often do when a difficult change is imminent.

It is possible that the stories are linked, but this isn’t made clear, leaving the reader to decide. However, there is a common thread of self-destruction running through these stories. Alcoholism or alcohol as self medication is seen in four of the six stories and destructive or broken relationships feature in all but one. Death and violence are also featured throughout, sometimes just in the thoughts of the characters, for instance in Lilac Tree the protagonist wonders "what it would be like to be slapped and spat at."

On the title page, the writer states: "Because if you hadn’t asked the right questions, we’d never even know." In this collection of stories, Stevens gives us an extremely engaging glimpse of what can lie behind, "I’m fine thanks." She shows us the truths we hide when we are afraid of how things will unravel if we reveal ourselves Without Makeup.

About the reviewer
Jennifer Morris was born in Leicester and has lived here most of her life. She has a husband and two children and a mad dog called Florence. She enjoys baking and drinking red wine with her friends.

Review by Rajvee Vyas of "A River Sutra" by Gita Mehta

I was going to review something fresh and new, but with summer drawing to an end, I could think of only Gita Mehta’s A River Sutra as an ideal companion to a dark, autumnal evening. The novel is set by the holy banks of the Indian Narmada River. It is here that our narrator - a retired bureaucrat whose name we never find out, intends to spend his retiring days peacefully, managing a guest house amongst idyllic hills and forests. Instead, he encounters a set of bewildering characters, and he is soon pushed into an enchanting world where their lives weave with his.

The Narmada is the central motif, a sutra – thread, which holds all of Mehta’s characters’ stories together; a young man renounces his life of pleasures and riches in order to become a Jain Monk; Hindu music teacher, Master Mohan, reveals the celestial voice of a blind orphan Muslim boy to the landed gentry, but it is tragically silenced; entangled in a subliminal trance between reality and myth, a tea estate executive finds himself bewitched by a tribal woman; a bandit kidnaps a courtesan’s daughter in the belief that she is his eternal love; and, the pupil of a musical maestro vows to marry his guru’s ‘ugly’ daughter once he has been taught the art of music, only to abandon his promise. The final two stories involve the Naga Baba, following his life as an ascetic who rescues a child from a brothel, with the novel’s ending bringing a revelatory and shocking twist to his identity.

Mehta’s lyrical prose ripples and resonates like the River. Her novel reminding us perhaps better now than when it was first published, that India is a land rich in a myriad of cultures and diverse peoples, all converging together by its banks, journeying towards the vast ocean.

About the reviewer
Rajvee Vyas loves to read, write, clean, and bake (in no particular order).