The Great Chimera
SynopsisPlot
Eager to flee the parochialism of her French upbringing, and a painful family past, the young and beautiful Marina falls in love with a seductive Greek sea-captain she meets at the port of Rouen. She follows him to the Aegean island of Syros to begin a new life as a married woman in the home of her formidable mother-in-law. Enchanted by the beauty of her surroundings, and fascinated by her husband's erudite younger brother, she aspires to learn all she can about contemporary Greek culture and live up to the ideals of her classical education. But when disaster upends her husband's shipping business and the comfortable stability of their life together, Marina's world slides into a vicious circle of love, passion, and death. Set in the early decades of the twentieth century, this is an exquisite account of the inner life of the heroine, and the collisions of different cultures and ways of being.
Story
About this book
Marina, a young French woman eager to leave behind her provincial background and a difficult family history, meets a Greek sea-captain at the port of Rouen. She marries him and follows him to the Aegean island of Syros, where she enters the household of his imposing mother-in-law and begins adjusting to life in Greece. Drawn to her new surroundings and to her husband's learned younger brother, she throws herself into studying contemporary Greek culture, hoping to connect her classical education with the living country around her.
The novel is set in the early decades of the twentieth century, a period when Greece's maritime economy and its cultural identity were both shifting. When financial disaster strikes her husband's shipping business, the stability Marina has built starts to collapse. The story follows her increasingly turbulent inner life as love, desire, and loss pull her in competing directions.
M. Karagatsis, one of the notable Greek prose writers of the twentieth century, moves between lyrical and plain-spoken styles across the book. The collision between French and Greek ways of living, between idealized classical learning and messy daily reality, runs through the narrative. Syros itself, a small Cycladic island with a long history as a commercial port, serves as a vivid and contained setting for these tensions.
