#ikonomou

The recent history of Greece is a story of depravity and devastation. When the funds from European Union programs arrived in the 1980s and ’90s, government officials of all parties squandered them or used them to dig foundations for bed-and-breakfasts in the middle of nowhere — sites without access roads, electricity or water — only to abandon them, while farmers falsified their records to receive grossly inflated subsidies, allowing corruption to soak through every cell of society. After the global financial crisis of 2008, the economy shrank by a quarter, unemployment reached 25 percent and property prices collapsed. The longest recession any capitalist economy has ever witnessed, the Greek crisis plunged the country into social unrest and prompted more than 350,000 professionals to migrate abroad.

“In order to save Greece, first we have to lose it,” Christos Ikonomou writes in “Good Will Come From the Sea,” and it is through this dark but discerning prism that he considers the precariousness of his country’s fate. A novella consisting of four connected stories, the first installment of a projected trilogy, “Good Will Come From the Sea” is set on an imaginary island in the Aegean that serves as a proxy for Greece — a place to which displaced Athenians are forced by unemployment and other economic necessities to flee and start their lives again.

Ilustradora autodidacta y artista visual que vive en San Francisco, CA.

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The upheaval caused by the economic crisis in Greece has inspired many artists and writers in recent years. In many respects, seeing the crisis through the lens of the visual arts, drama, poetry, and fiction, has helped put it into perspective in ways the statistics and the news media cannot. A case in point is undoubtedly Christos Ikonomou’s Good Will Come From the Sea, shortlisted for the London Hellenic Prize 2020.

Masterfully translated by Karen Emmerich and longlisted for the 2020 Best Translated Book Award, this collection of blistering, darkly humorous stories constitutes a profound meditation on the nature of justice in an unjust world, a tender and defiant song of loss, a study of poverty’s toll on the human soul. The book follows a group of Athenian friends seeking to escape the paralyzing effects of the Greek economic crisis by moving to an Aegean island in the hopes of starting over. Viewed with suspicion and disdain by the locals, they soon find themselves enmeshed in the same vicious cycle of money, power, and violence they thought they had left behind.

Artemis and Stavros see their dreams destroyed when a local cartel burns down their restaurant; wheelchair-bound Chronis agonizes as a neighbor assaults a young girl. Meanwhile, Lazarus wanders the island in search of his lost son, “disappeared” at the hands of the local mob – the same gangsters who break visionary Tasos’s body and spirit for daring to stand up to them.As the characters mourn their livelihoods, loved ones, and dreams, only ghostly threads of hope keep them marching toward a future that shows little promise of change.

Christos Ikonomou was born in Athens in 1970. He has published three collections of short stories, The Woman on the Rails, (Ellinika Grammata, 2003), Something Will Happen, You’ll See, (Polis, 2010) and All Good Things Will Come From The Sea, (Polis, 2014). Something will Happen You’ll See has won the prestigious Best Short-Story Collection State Award and became the most reviewed Greek book of 2011. It has been translated into German (CH Beck, 2013), English (Archipelago Books, 2016), Spanish (Valparaiso, 2016), French (Quidam, 2016), Croatian (VBZ, 2016) and Italian (Elliot Edizioni, 2016). All Good Things Will Come from the Sea has been translated into Italian (Elliot Edizioni, 2016). The French (Quidam) and US (Archipelago) editions are forthcoming.