ARCHIPELAGO by Natalie Bakopoulos reviewed by Ellen Prentiss Campbell • Cleaver Magazine

Fiction by Natalie Bakopoulos, reviewed by Ellen Prentiss Campbell
ARCHIPELAGO (Tin House)

Natalie Bakopoulos’s third novel Archipelago operates on one level as an ontological journey story. On another level, it’s a mystery. Above all, Archipelago is a continuous meditation on language, narration, and translation.

The reserved, unnamed narrator searches to understand herself, as well as her role as a translator against the backdrop of historic and present violence, personal and political. Her tone is quiet, her tension and conflict internal. She parses the uses, misuses, understandings, and misunderstandings inherent in narrative language and experience. A translator, she is drawn to distinctions and similarities between original authorship, interpretation, and translation. A woman crossing the border into midlife, she is vexed by the similar complications of seeing and being seen.

The events of this exploration of the narrator’s inner space take place during a post-Covid summer. On break from her teaching position in a Midwestern university, she is at a translators’ residency on a Croatian island. A multilingual American, she grew up speaking Ukrainian in her immigrant maternal grandmother’s kitchen. She spoke Greek on summer sojourns with her paternal grandfather on the Ionian island where he lived. The beautifully rendered island settings and quotations from Homer woven into the text (as translated by Emily Wilson) underscore the theme of personal journey as odyssey.

During the residency, she encounters an acquaintance, Luka, a Bosnian journalist. He recognizes her but misremembers, calls her by a name not quite her own, recalls her wearing a navy-blue dress she never owned. He reveals he is working on a novel featuring a woman rather like the narrator—who wears a navy-blue dress. This fictional woman, the narrator’s apparent almost doppelgänger, makes spectral appearances, dropping clues to the overarching mysteries of the confluence between fiction and reality.

Luka and the narrator fall into a relationship. The residency ends; she remains. Not staying for him, she says, in her continuous stream of internal dialogue. Lingering on the island is no Calypso moment, she avers, more self-aware intellectually than emotionally. Luka does depart. Musing on their inconclusive relationship she reflects, “Direct communication is best, they say, but I think it’s overrated […] Everything exists in the subtext.”

She leaves and travels to the Greek island of her childhood, reclaiming the house she inherited from her grandfather. Here she is more truly alone than among the casual company of the other translators, more alone than in her insubstantial, evanescent relationship with Luka.

Home is the traveler on her own island. She swims. “The water was delicious, and I felt my intellect and my senses and my body merge with it. I am part of the water, I have opened up to the sea.”

Fully embodied, she inhabits the present, the place, and memories. Before, she’s hovered above experience and feelings, intentionally or instinctively protecting herself, detached. Occupational hazard, perhaps: a writer, writing about her life; a translator, translating her experience. This tendency to distance and analyze, this observing and self-observing stance, has distanced her from herself, from others, and has held the reader at a distance, too.

Now, fully present, she engages the reader. The novel’s exploration of the possibilities of narrative language arcs toward its conclusion and fulfills her promise:

This is not a story about logic. It’s a story about theme and variation and echo, told not to recreate what happened or even what could have happened but to create a happening on the page. About what it all felt like. Not the creation of story but its decreation. A self you unravel to its ante-self, an allowance of opacity, and then put back together again and hope the filigree patches of gold make it glow. With the understanding that this seam is the only self and it is like the seashore, never fixed and never the same.

Finally, Archipelago stands as both a novel and a meditation on the art and craft of writing: study and example of story and storytelling, investigation and illustration of the desire and the artistry of revelation and understanding. Bakopoulos makes the filigree patches glow. This eloquent work lingers in the reader’s mind.

Archipelago was published by Tin House in August.

Ellen Prentiss Campbell’s collection of love stories is Known By Heart. Her story collection Contents Under Pressure was nominated for the National Book Award, and her debut novel, The Bowl with Gold Seams, won the Indy Excellence Award for Historical Fiction. Her novel Frieda’s Song was a finalist for the Next Generation Indie Book Award, Historical Fiction. Her column, “Girl Writing,” appears in the Washington Independent Review of Books bi-monthly. For many years, Campbell practiced psychotherapy. She lives in Washington, DC, and is at work on another novel.