New novel by Panos Karnezis
The last thing that readers of Panos Karnezis might have expected is a page-turner that hews close to the much-publicized escapades of famous Greek shipping tycoons. His latest novel, «The Birthday Party,» already out in Greek from Livanis and due out in English from Jonathan Cape in July, seems to have little in common with the quixotic fictional figures of his earlier work, unless you count human fallibility as a theme. Karnezis does have a gift for surprises. His debut short-story collection «Little Infamies» appeared out of nowhere in 2002 to become a best-seller. A Greek engineer, who starts writing in English as a hobby, goes on to do an MA in creative writing and whose first book gains instant popularity, is a distinct novelty, after all. Human comedy Those stories were set in a nameless village where zany inhabitants acted out the human comedy. His first novel, «The Maze» (2004), short-listed for the 2004 Whitbread Prize for a First Novel, was set on the broader canvas of Asia Minor, trailing the exploits of a lost remnant of the Greek expeditionary force. Humor, a touch of magic realism and a non-judgmental take on his character’s weaknesses were persistent strands in both books. «The Birthday Party» looks very different. Much of the story mirrors that of Greek tycoon Aristotle Onassis, though the identification is not intended to be total. The hero, Marco Timoleon, grows up in Asia Minor, the son of a father who disappears one day and a devoted mother, facts that determine much of his behavior but are subjected, as are nearly all his life events, to endless revision as Timoleon constantly recreates his past. The novel traces his ruthless tactics, business coups – from Latin America to the US and Europe – and womanizing. A self-made man who acquires fleets of tankers and planes and untold wealth by virtue of boundless self-confidence and willpower, Timoleon is consumed with a desire for total control and prey to superstition. The story, told by a biographer who has become part of the story in his attempt to unravel the truth, opens at a birthday party Timoleon is holding for his daughter. Not a happy family occasion, its a ruse to deal with a pregnancy of which Timoleon does not approve. Kathimerini English Edition asked Karnezis about his latest book. What made you decide to write about characters inspired by recognizable real-life models? Fascination. The idea for «The Birthday Party» was born while reading a 600-page biography of Howard Hughes. That led me to read other biographies, among them some about Aristotle Onassis. He became the inspiration for the hero of my novel, Marco Timoleon, although I would not say they are identical in character. I am always interested in that interplay between reality and fantasy, truth and fiction – it’s the reason I like magic realism, I guess – and the lives of those famous tycoons of the 20th century are full of myths, half-truths and lies told by others as much as they themselves. What new insights did you hope to bring to this well-known story? Having read thousands of pages and learned countless facts about the lives of those people, I found that I still could not see them clearly in my mind’s eye – what they were really like, how they behaved in their everyday lives, or toward their employees, their wives and children. This is something that fiction can do much more successfully than biography because it has the freedom to enter people’s minds, dramatize events, use humor and caricature, take liberties with the truth in order to highlight matters that a biography is, of course, not allowed to do. Two questions came to mind which I tried to ask – not answer – in the book: What’s it like to live in that world of excessive wealth? And what is really true in all those biographies we read? No libel risk Did you ever feel yourself tiptoeing around the risk of a potential libel case? No, firstly because Marco Timoleon is not a real person, despite the obvious similarities. And not only are all those people I was inspired by long dead but also they belong to a world that itself no longer exists. The lone ruthless entrepreneur has now been replaced by the board of directors of big corporations. How have Greek readers and critics responded to your choice of subject and your approach to it? I have the feeling that people were intrigued by the choice of subject, which, as far as I know, had not been taken up by Greek novelists before. I’m also often asked the question you asked too, that is, what the book has to add to a large body of work – books, films, TV series, magazine articles – already out there, which I hope I answered here. Anyway, the book, I’m told, has been received well by the public and it’s on the best-sellers lists. Do your books go according to plan or do your characters ever run away with the story? A writer always hopes that his characters will run away with the plot. It’s a sign of the book coming alive, of the writer having created a credible, unpredictable entity that resembles a bit a real-life person. It doesn’t happen always, of course, and even in the same book there may be characters who are more alive than others. But I think that a novel where the writing has gone according to the plan the writer had originally come up with is usually a tame, stilted piece of work. Lost in translation? You translate your own work from English into Greek. What changes, if any, do you observe in that transition? The first thing I notice in a translation is the different sounds of the words from the original, as well as the different rhythm. Translated words may well have a different number of syllables compared to the original words, and also the length of sentences may change. All these – the different number of syllables, the different sounds of vowels, the different length of sentences – give the translated text another music, if you like. Also, I notice that some of the humor – and especially irony – are inevitably lost in translation because certain expressions do not exist in another language. Have you got any new projects in mind? I am now starting on another novel, which will take me at least two years, and after that I’d like to do a book of stories again. We’ll see. I’d rather not say anything else, I’m a bit superstitious when it comes to discussing work in progress.
