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"Here's another
Greek-Australian name
to add to the list that has contributed a richer, deeper, darker strain to Australian writing over the past
half-century."
- SMH 5/6/10
PALIMPSEST is a book about high ideals and low obsessions, truth and identity, immigration, nationality and race; about what we believe and what happens when belief degenerates into fanaticism.
When thirty-year-old philosopher Kally Palamas must unexpectedly leave Coober Pedy, Australia, to attend her estranged fathers funeral in Zelopolis, Greece, all she really wants is to escape her stagnant life and her inability to participate in academia after the death of her daughter.
In Zelopolis, Kally begins receiving anonymous installments of The Akindyniad, an account of her fathers life, written by the mute and deformed son of a local shepherd. She discovers that her fathers noble ambition to become a philosopher has devolved into a dark, fanatic plan to restore the life and traditions of the ancient city of Zelopolis.
THE AUTHOR
Kathryn Koromilas is the author of PALIMPSEST: A NOVEL, forthcoming early 2010 by Arcadia, an imprint of Australian Scholarly Publishing.
Born and raised in Sydney, Kathryn Koromilas is a writer, postgraduate philosophy student and traveller who spent almost a decade living by the Ionian Sea, near ancient Nikopolis, a region whose history and geography inspired PALIMPSEST.
Her European ‘odyssey’ ended in 2009 when she returned home to her humble, antipodean ‘Ithaca’ to continue to write and study.
SYNOPSIS
Opening by the Ionian Sea in the village of Zelopolis, PALIMPSEST is a book about high ideals and low obsessions, truth and identity, immigration, nationality and race; about what we believe and what happens when belief degenerates into fanaticism.
When thirty-year-old philosopher Kally Palamas must unexpectedly leave Coober Pedy, Australia to attend her estranged father's funeral in Zelopolis, all she really wants is to escape her stagnant life and her inability to participate in academia after the death of her daughter.
Ten years after Akindynos left his Australian home in search of spiritual and cultural rejuvenation in the village of his birth, his daughter Kally arrives for his funeral. Kally is with her mother Anastasia, on whom she is completely dependent after her daughter's loss left her emotionally and intellectually derelict. When her mother returns to Australia after the funeral, Kally stays on in Zelopolis. She wants to explore the odd circumstances surrounding her father's death. Kally thus becomes a kind of philosophical detective deciphering the logic behind the villagers' talk of suicide, and of murder.
Kally withdraws into her father's world: literally into his office, the basement room, where she sleeps and eats and explores his files, books, papers and letters. She must not only unravel the mystery of his death but she must separate fact from fiction. She sifts through biography, fake history, eyewitness and media reports, journals and correspondence and essays that make up the layers of this palimpsest of racial, familial and personal histories.
Then, she starts receiving anonymous instalments of
The Akindyniad, a chronicle of her father's life and work, written by Ari Paleologos, the mute and deformed son of a local shepherd. In the pages of The Akindyniad Kally discovers that her father's noble ambition to become a philosopher has devolved into a dark, fanatic plan to restore the life and traditions of the ancient city of Zelopolis, rewriting the history of the village to suit his vision and cleansing the village of racial impurities.
Akindynos (haunted by the demoralising effects of migration to Australia – displacement, bankruptcy and unemployment) had, so Ari's version of the history goes, returned to the village of his birth in hope of restoring his severed relationship with his past, but found it in physical and spiritual decay. In an attempt to revive the village, but also his own battered ego, he arouses interest in the ancient heritage, takes part in restorative work at the archaeological site of ancient Zelopolis and heads a layman's philosophy group to boost morale. Charismatic by nature, Akindynos exerts a magical influence over many of the villagers and comes to be known as the Village Philosopher. But Akindynos's ebullient presence in Zelopolis also has its darker side: he calls for the restitution of the cultural superiority of his race, the full restoration of ancient Zelopolis for the true descendants of the ancient Zelopolians, and wants to rid the area of all foreigners.
In Zelopolis, Kally confronts a cast of characters, including Ari's father, Thomas Paleologos, who acts as Kally's sometime guide and navigates her through the village's geography and his version of its history. He introduces her to her father's followers and reveals things that are hidden but also keeps things hidden: for example, the extent to which his son is involved in the death of Akindynos. Kally is also befriended by Katerina, a documentary-film maker who is investigating migrant stories that end in tragedy. Katerina's sharp and dramatic interpretation of Akindynos's story complements Kally's philosophical approach and both versions help shed light on the spiritual, mental and physical ruination that culminated in Akindynos's death.
During Kally's sojourn in Zelopolis and in the midst of her unravelling of her father's story, she meets and forms an unlikely relationship with Valon, an Albanian migrant whose ancestors lived in the area centuries ago. He migrated on foot to Zelopolis from Albania years earlier to work on farmland
neglected by locals. A practical and industrious man, he quickly gained the respect of the village-folk, especially that of Grandmother Kallisto, a philosopher in her own right, who baptised him into the Orthodox faith and offers him a daily meal.
But Kally's relationship with Valon causes Alexander (Katerina's American-Greek friend who returns to the village to reclaim his family's farmland from Valon and others like him) to reveal his own latent nationalism.
The events that follow, those that lead the reader to the story's dénouement are at once tragic and - in the spirit of the ancient storytellers - cathartic.
© 2010 KATHRYN KOROMILAS
EXCERPT
Chapter One
MY FATHER was born and baptised in a depressed little village called Zelopolis in 1928 and found dead on Zelopolis beach seventy-seven years later. It was a local shepherd who found him early on that Wednesday morning. The tide had eased and my fathers wrecked body lay perpendicular to the pull of the Ionian, his toes still playing at the edge of the water. I learned later that my father had taken to wearing a chiton — the ancient dress — and thats what he had on before he died. When Thomas Paleologos found him, my fathers chiton had been torn off at the shoulder, so it looked more like a kilt than a robe, and his brown leather sandals were lost to the sea.
Thomas, who became my sometime guide, told me that he always looked to the beach for signs of death on that day (June 11 was the anniversary of the poets death and the copycat suicides) but he hadnt seen a body in years. That morning the shepherd had been lying flat under the shade of a pine tree, his dull thoughts lulling him into a sleep hed been deprived of due to his morning duties. His flock grazed behind him on the hillside that ran up off the beach and undulated for a few hundred metres before it plateaued out into Zelopolis village proper. When the hot eye of the sun peeked through a gap in the trees canopy and woke him, Thomas sat up, alert, as if hed never had any sleep and lit a cigarette. He knew what he would see and he looked to the beach to see it.
There was my father. Akindynos Palamas. Quite clearly visible, the distance to Thomas was less than a hundred metres. Distinct in his sky-blue toga, his body was inanimate. Not in the way a sleeping body might be, unmoving and yet, comfortably, naturally one could say, sprawled, but in that eerie twisted way that one, if one has had the opportunity, confronts only in death.
Thomas whistled to his flock of thirty-three. The animals, nervous by nature, understood the urgency in their shepherds call and moved quickly down the hill and across the road where Thomas instructed them, in the sheepmans language of whistle and whoop, to remain occupied with the foliage that had sustained life there. Thomas then made his way down to the pebbled beach and headed to the static form that once belonged to his friend, my father. When he finally stood over the body, he frowned, Christe mou, he said, and nudged Akindynoss hip with his boot. You, too?
Thomas bowed his head and executed the sign that every simple man makes when confronted with matters beyond his understanding: he brought his thumb, fore and middle fingers together then gently flicked his wrist so that the triad of fingertips drew the shape of a cross in mid-air, there just in front of his chest. He then unclipped his mobile phone from his shirt pocket to make two phone calls. The first was to Babis at the police station. The second was to Stamatia, the eldest of Akindynoss five sisters, who then called my mother. It was six in the evening in Coober Pedy when the call came through in the dull ringtone that Anastasia had chosen so as not to startle me when I was supposed to be working. I simply let the phone ring, just as I always did. The world brought home through the telephone and other connective devices was out of bounds for me. In any case, Anastasia had just returned from the mine and so she answered it.
Come quickly! Stamatia had said. She told Anastasia that Akindynos was quite ill when, in fact, he was quite dead. Stamatia had said that my father was in intensive care, that they didnt know exactly what was wrong with him, that it wasnt a stroke and it wasnt the evil sickness, but whatever it was it was very serious and that we should hurry. Stamatia believed it best to avoid talk of the true state of affairs, at least until Anastasia and I had arrived when there would be no choice but to face death head on. The prospect of more life, even if sickly, proved to be more of a comfort to us than the vacuous initiation of death. And so, Anastasia made the urgent plans for travel with the expectation that we could once again see Akindynos.
When Babis and two other uniformed men joined Thomas and the dead Akindynos down on the beach, Thomas rattled on about his mornings find. Summertime, I graze the sheep there, Thomas said, pointing back to the green strip of land from which hed first seen Akindynos. And there, he said, pointing to the modest white house inserted into the slope, is Akindynoss home. Thomass commentary was more rhetoric than revelation since Babis knew both shepherd and corpse. See, Thomas said, how his head twists back to look at his house for one last time. Look, even aged bodies can demonstrate agility in extraordinary circumstances.
Thomas, Babis, and the other men from the Perasma City Police Station pronounced that Akindynos was the very last person in all of Epirus they imagined theyd find dead on this or any other day. In fact, ever since Akindynos had arrived in Zelopolis and started doing philosophy for the villagers, the policemen no longer expected the early morning alarm on June 11 signalling that the day of the suicides had come, once again. Theyd come to understand that Akindynoss philosophy could cure a mans disgust, the source of all human crime. But now, the appearance of the drowned philosopher (found only a few feet from where the poet had been found, alive — for he was a good swimmer — only to shoot himself later that day seventy-seven years ago) threw every simple theory of human nature into perplexity. Babis simply shook his head and said, This. I did not expect this. Thomas said that they should use the logical devices of their ancestors to determine a possible cause of death. It was what Akindynos the philosopher would have wanted. It was all he had crusaded for over the last decade. But Thomas had secretly rejected Akindynoss teachings because he knew that out in the country it was instinct that prevailed over intellect. Thomas had come to the renegade conclusion that it was always instinct that insinuated the truth long before reasoned deduction ever acknowledged it. A siren penetrated the early morning hush announcing Akindynoss unanticipated finale. Church bells would echo the announcement more exuberantly later that day.
The ambulance crew packed Akindynos up, switched on the revolving red light, and silently escorted him along the National Road, then through the flat geometric sprawl of modern Zelopolis, and out through the restored fortification walls of ancient Zelopolis, then down past the bus depot and the fancy city cemetery with its large marble crosses, busts, and angel-winged sculptures, past the stark rectangle of the army barracks, past the commemorative plaque built on the spot where the poets body was finally found dead under the shade of a poplar, with his head propped up on his straw hat, and then along the lower part of the port, past the fishermen with their blue boats and portable radios, the one-eyed cats and gammy-legged dogs, until finally, the vehicle rolled onto the grounds of the Perasma Municipal Hospital. As Thomas walked through the glass doors of the newish town hospital he knew that something else, something quite new, had begun. He then turned toward the kiosk and ordered a shot of sweet Greek coffee in a short plastic cup.
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PRESS RELEASE
Download the Press Release.
REVIEWS
Here's another Greek-Australian name to add to the list that has contributed a richer, deeper, darker strain to Australian writing over the past half-century.
In this sophisticated and frankly intellectual work, the narrator, Kally Palamas, is an academic philosopher and bereaved mother. Paralysed by the death of her infant daughter, unable to think or work and living in Coober Pedy with her visionary opal-mining mother, Anastasia, she is then summoned to Greece to deal with the death of her estranged father, Akindynos, an autodidact and self-styled philosopher.
This novel is about many things: family, migration, the limits of philosophy and the lures of the intellectual life. Koromilas examines the point at which enthusiasm becomes fanaticism, especially with regard to race and nation, and she knows she doesn't need to spell out the implications.
Kerryn Goldsworthy
SMH 5th July 2010
Kathryn Koromilas' novel Palimpsest is about many things but in particular and above all, it is about Home. Like tributaries converging to their fountain-head, the novel is about the idea of home and implicitly about the philosophy of home.
Dr Edward Spence
Read: The Philosophy of Home
Palimpsest is proudly postmodern. Extolling and proclaiming its self-conscious intertextuality....Philosophical fiction is art that can transform lives. Koromilas is a thoughtful writer, but she must leave the academy behind if she wants to write authentic fiction.
Susan Gorgioski Australian Book Review June 2010
Read: Palimpsest review in June ABR
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News
26 May 2010
Palimpsest launched as part of the 15 Minutes of Fame event at the Emerging Writers Festival, Melbourne.
May 2010
Palimpseston Gleebooks bestseller list for May.
19 April 2010
Palimpsest book launchat Gleebooks website.
Photos and videos on YouTUBE.
12 March 2010
Palimpsest book launch event now listed on Gleebooks website. Reserve a place.
Greek Festival of Sydney launch.
Palimpsest event on page 14 of the program.
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© 2010 KATHRYN KOROMILAS - PALIMPSEST: A NOVEL
