Word: mermaids
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Mermaid Madonna, by Stratis Myrivilis. Life is harsh, but the living of it sweet, in this island idyl of the wine-dark sea by one of Greece's finest novelists...
...Mermaid Madonna, by Stratis Myrivilis. Life is harsh, but the living of it sweet, in this island idyl of the wine-dark sea by one of Greece's finest novelists...
...blonde, green-eyed girl, found as a baby by a drink-fuddled Greek fisherman and grown into a woman who has the local boys dreaming. By most fictional standards, this should be the cutoff point, the end of any sensible man's interest in a novel called The Mermaid Madonna. No one should make that mistake. Author Stratis Myrivilis is probably the finest of living Greek writers. The Mermaid Madonna is the first of his books to come to the U.S., and even with its liberal dash of corn it introduces a writer who makes the true novelist...
...villagers are not only poor, they are refugees from Turkish Anatolia. They are superstitious, backbiting and Christian to the point of worshiping a mermaid Madonna whom a passing fisherman has painted on a wall of the local church. Their life comes from the sea, and it is the sea that dominates the novel. The heroine worships it, the hero dies in it, and the plain villagers are bounded by it as their neighbors are bounded by olive groves. The young men may lust for Smaragthi. but they lust even more for the sea and the role of boat...
Author Myrivilis allows for more sentimentality than most; yet it does not cloy. The reason is quite simple: that is how things are. Smaragthi remains consistent to the end, unmarried, herself a sort of mermaid Madonna who rolls naked in the sea like a porpoise but shrinks with revulsion from a man's touch. The fishermen soak up the local booze, beat their wives, and listen with awe to the tavernkeeper's yarns about the wonders of America, where he made his pile. An ancient crone tells wondrous fairy tales. A pathetic schoolmaster dreams of the great...