‘Female Poker’ plays its fabulist hand with reality
It is not often that you come across a novel with endnotes and a bibliography. Then, again, Mimis Androulakis’s latest book, «Female Poker» (Kastaniotis Editions, in Greek), barely fits the definition of a novel, even in a postmodern sense. It is really a book about politics and policies. The author himself, in the postscript, says of the book that «(it) forecasts a new stage of transformation for globalized capitalism based on budding changes in its credit component and attempts to answer, (with the help of) new financial instruments, to the classic question ‘What to do?’ from the viewpoint of a left-wing government in the 21st century.» It doesn’t sound like the kind of material that would thrill the average reader of novels. Yet, like Androulakis’s other books, whether fiction or non-fiction, it has become a best seller, by Greek market standards, selling over 25,000 copies in the four months since it first came out last November. One of the reasons for its success was the author himself. Mimis Androulakis, a former rising star in the Greek Communist Party, now an MP with the Panhellenic Socialist Movement (PASOK), is a colorful personality with an evident enthusiasm for new ideas, although he mostly appropriates the ideas of others rather than producing his own. His enthusiasm relegated him for many years to the margins of politics and earned him the enmity of both his old friends, the Communists, and his new allies, the Socialists, many of whom he offended by his harsh indictment of PASOK founder Andreas Papandreou back in 1989. He has only recently made a comeback, placed by Andreas Papandreou’s son, George, among the list of countrywide elected MPs who do not have to fight for a constituency vote, but are elected according to their party’s overall performance. Even now, he is regarded as too much of a maverick by his suspicious fellow Socialists. Ideologically unorthodox Androulakis used his exile from mainstream politics to become a familiar figure in the media as a challenger of ideological orthodoxies and an avid seeker of new information relating to politics, culture, science and, above all, his first love, mathematics. He speaks in a sometimes engaging and sometimes annoying rapid-fire, staccato style, where one sentence melds into another, while his audience often struggles to follow him. This book is undoubtedly his product: He writes as he speaks. In addition to the author’s colorful personality, the book was cleverly marketed as one that would reveal to the public the name of the first woman to become Greece’s prime minister in the not-so-distant future. Many, no doubt, rushed to buy this book believing they would read a roman-a-clef. It is not so. There is very little plot in it, almost all of it in the beginning of the book, where the author stretches himself a bit clumsily to produce a «globalized» environment setting the tone for the discussion that follows. Most of the book is in the form of a dialogue within a blog. A total of 10 people take part, with the most active participants being the author himself and a young woman, Androulakis’s «future prime minister.» The discussion itself is very wide-ranging and there are plenty of exciting ideas presented, touching upon economics and mathematics but mostly upon the challenges facing a modern government, from markets to labor, the decentralization of power to the health system and the environment. Androulakis seems to have followed almost every debate on these issues on a global scale and manages to comment upon them in some 400 pages or so. However, he makes little effort to develop them as distinct characters. They all speak alike and complement, rather than contradict, each other. The «female» in the title refers not only to Androulakis’s heroine but also to a way of thinking unconventionally about problems – supposedly mostly a female characteristic shared by gifted males. He makes clear his admiration for the «new women» that have recently risen to the top in their professions, mainly in the financial sectors, but his admiration, like a conventional male’s, is focused on beautiful women, especially beautiful mothers of several children. (Plot spoiler follows!) And, although he raves about their abilities, their strength and their independence, his heroine becomes speechless and disappears from the blog dialogue when she recognizes that a former lover has joined the debate (he, of course, does not know his ex is a participant) and reappears when he has faded away.
