The Review of Contemporary Fiction

The Few Things I Know about Glafkos Thrassakis, by Vassilis Vassilikos, translated by Karen Emmerich
reviewed by Allen Hibbard

Vassilis Vassilikos. The Few Things I Know about Glafkos Thrassakis. Trans. Karen Emmerich. Seven Stories, 2002. 356 pp. $24.95.

Vassilikos creates an unnamed narrator who is writing a biography of the fictional writer Glafkos Thrassakis (pen name for Lazarus Lazaridis). An “afterword” devoted to Thrassakis’s text “Conversations with Andreas Kalvos,” identifying parallels between his own life and that of the real nineteenth-century Greek writer, adds yet one more layer to the patently palimpsestic quality of this work while at the same time blurring fact and fiction. Vassilikos probes the intriguing dynamics between biographer and subject: how the biographer is prone to identify with certain qualities of his subject and how his own life narrative is influenced by the subject as he retraces his subject’s steps. Whose life is whose, we might ask in the end, and where does one life begin and another end? Woven into the fabric of the material (both the biographer’s and Thrassakis’s) are important historical references, particularly to the dark days of the junta in Greece, the nefarious actions of Henry Kissinger, the workings of American imperialism, and various leftist activities. The theme of exile and return is central as Thrassakis and others are either forced to leave their countries or choose to do so. The work performs the virtual impossibility of adequately and truthfully representing a whole life, accounting for all its multiple facets. There will be just “the few things I know” about the subject—a series of vignettes, or snapshots, or speculative reconstructions. The novel contains stories of the biographer’s sleuthing as well as various documents, such as diary extracts and excerpts or synopses of his literary production. This results in a curious, unique structure. As the narrator/biographer reflects toward the end of the work, “I’m not a fan of ‘statistical’ biographies that start with the person’s birth and end with his death.” Rather, he says he has taken his material as it came, “following whatever path it might lead me down.”