Menelaos Lountemis (Greek: 螠蔚谓苇位伪慰蟼 螞慰蠀谓蟿苇渭畏蟼) was the pen name one of the most important essayists in the Greek interwar period and post-World War II era. His pen name was inspired by his later homeland's river Loudias.
A cult book of children literature in Greece, with an interesting setting and food for thought. The plot may seem very simple and banal in the eyes of the cynical reader (some poor orphan trying to go to school and experiencing poverty, stuck up teachers and romance) but all that are dressed nicely not only with a very well fleshed out way of life, but also with likable characters and a very good insight to the worries of that era鈥檚 youths.
The first thing that made a great impression on me is the words Loudemis was using. It was a lot of now mostly obsolete local dialects that made several dialogues to be hard to comprehend if you are accustomed only to the 鈥淜oine Greek鈥� which is basically the common use of the language spoken by everyday people in all the country and without the local idioms. So it is surely rather hard to get what do all these words mean if you never were a farmer and in touch with tools and places that are now only found in museums. I remember stopping reading every two minutes just to go ask my parents what do these alien words mean, heh. And guess what, not even they knew half of them, simply because they were even before their time or were known to them with a different word. Basically they were synonyms based on bastardization of Koine by other foreign cultures coexisting with the Greeks for many centuries.
It鈥檚 not like the book is incomprehensible; it is still easy to figure out the context if you read a few sentences in a row and keep track of words that repeat. It is also a great way to feel like the story is written in a genuine tongue, meaning you are really made to believe the characters are illiterate backwater shepherds who speak with words mingled by other languages or degraded because of the lack of proper education. At worst, they will sound in Greek like cowboys in Wild West with a very heavy accent and chewing of certain syllables.
The above is peanuts before the second thing that made an impression on me; the constant allegories Loudemis is using in order to describe his feelings towards everyday events. They were making the reading to feel really fantasy-like even when it was describing plain events. It also gave a great lyrical note to them, proving how imaginative and idealistic his mindset is. I will give some examples considering this, by mentioning the most memorable quotes I still recall from the story. - 鈥淭he wind was blowing like a gypsy鈥� meaning the wind was annoyingly hot. - 鈥淭he rivers were rushing to drown in the sea鈥� meaning the snow up in the mountains was melting because of spring. - 鈥淭he stairs were roaring like kittens whose tails you stepped on鈥� meaning the wooden stairs were squeaking a lot. Of course the meanings to the above quotes are not explained to you; you need to figure them out yourself. This makes the book hard for casual readers who are used to straightforward explanations but a great emotional and mental reward for those who get them. It鈥檚 exactly what makes the reading to feel special and not just some typical peasants in some typical town doing typical stuff.
A third thing that impressed me is how he didn鈥檛 miss to include the way people felt about certain things. They weren鈥檛 passively plowing fields and cooking, they also had a mindset of their own, sometimes rebellious and anti-conformist. This is also what gave an identity to otherwise simple everyday people and despite still feeling like caricatures if seen from afar, the simple things each one of them was saying and doing throughout the story helped to flesh them out in a nice way.
Of course being a highly idealistic story, at times it felt like the author was placing too much of his personal hatred towards certain people and notions and thus this luminous book has black spots every time Loudemis nags about something. When he wants to be negative towards a mentality, he is doing it in a most blunt and cartoony way which makes it feel bad next to everything else. Maybe he is kinda excused to be vulgar and insulting towards what you don鈥檛 like and surely having no mood to sit down and flesh out people you hate. But darn, those parts felt so awkward to read. More specifically he has an anathema towards 鈥渒athare Greek鈥�, an old and supposed pure and sophisticated way of the language that nobody was using much even back in those days but was otherwise taught in schools as the official grammar just because it had a lot better structure and lyrical sound to it. It was let鈥檚 say the equivalent of teaching a Shakespearean type of language to bunch of rednecks. His hatred for a language that common people don鈥檛 understand led him to write in their lingo and that means he prefers to sacrifice grammar density for emotional bonding with the reader. It works even if it doesn鈥檛 sound like mechanically perfect writing.
There is a second anathema in it, and that鈥檚 towards religion. The most bad mannered and evil so to speak people in the book is the school principal for being a supporter of kathare Greek, as well as his right hand men, the theology and grammar teachers. They are presented as nothing but mean, petty, ever angry, ever loathing cartoon villains who love to do nothing else besides hitting and mocking children for trying to think differently. And sure, I agree that the school is trying to teach you things their way, which usually has little to do with ACTUAL life. It鈥檚 just that Loudemis went overboard and turned them to demons trying to brainwash the students into becoming lifeless puppets who believe in God without ever making questions about Him and writing in a tongue they don鈥檛 even speak.
I understand why Loudemis did that, since his hero is as baronic as it gets and needed an appropriate setting to bring out his dislike for the status quo. Melios wanted to be a poet who writes about human misery, something he couldn鈥檛 do with the mechanical restrictions of kathare or the blind devotion to a religion that demands from you to love something you can鈥檛 see of prove of its existence, yet expect all the pain in life to be rewarded after death. And it is a more than obvious parallel to the author鈥檚 real life. Just like his hero was kicked out of school for writing in koine and not trusting God, so was he exiled from Greece for similar beliefs. This makes the story not exactly fictional but rather a school version of the author鈥檚 life, where he mentions all he loves and hates in his life. If you are aware of the modern rules of good literature, one of them would be to not place too much of yourself in a character because it turns the whole thing too biased towards some mentalities. But hey, the book is so old, there weren鈥檛 any such rules back then. It works fine in an emotional level for the time it was written.
Something which left me rather neutral is the romantic aspect of the story. Many students and teachers fall in love amongst them. I was amazed to see how equally corny it feels with modern chick flicks even if it was written 60 years ago. I was never a fan of romance and the awkward behavior they had toward each other felt very iffy for someone as cynical as me. It sure gave more passion to the story and it definitely excused better the clash of the orphan idealistic hero with the stuck up evil principal. He writes a love letter in koine, and hell breaks loose for not being in the language they teach him, as well as placing what they considered lust above the love for God. Other than that, ok, I didn鈥檛 like all the sappy stuff about how a girl鈥檚 eyes glitter like stars or how her hair dances gracefully in the wind. What is this, a shojo manga?
In all it was a very interesting read and I gladly recommend it to any Greek reader. It had a bit of everything in it, sad times, happy times, romance, a rebellion against the status quo, an adventure to the pastures of a simple way of life and the realization that one matures through pain and not through carefree strolling in the park. You can鈥檛 write about everyday life if you haven鈥檛 been slapped to the face a few thousand times by it and I guess this is what makes it far more likable and real to some other very famous and somewhat similar in themes series of books. You know, that series with a boy with glasses who goes to be a wizard and fights some evil reincarnated evil with stupid sounding names because it鈥檚 his destiny鈥�
I have read this book probably five times and I would read it again. It approaches the passing from the childhood to manhood with such delicacy and finesse that its like you see a flower blossoms in front of you. The first separation from the bosom of the family, the first love, the first real friendship its all there given to you from a charismatic author.
It had made me such an impression when I first read it, mostly because of Melios, book's main hero and author's persona; how he first managed to get through and how he was thrown away, afterwards, when he was simply thinking and writing differently than other students at school.