Home » Greece » Vassilis Vassilikos » Γλαύκος Θρασάκης (The Few Things I Know about Glafkos Thrassakis)
Vassilis Vassilikos:Γλαύκος Θρασάκης (The Few Things I Know about Glafkos Thrassakis)
There have been various versions of this book as the author added to them changed them and altered them in various ways. This might or might not be the definitive version but almost certainly is not but is the only English version.
As the title tells us, the unnamed narrator knows a few things about Glafkos Thrassakis but there is presumably a lot that he does not know. Glafkos’ real name was Lazarus Lazaridis and he was both a writer and a painter. He was born in Kavala in 1933. His mother tried and obviously failed to abort him. The newborn came into the world with a feeling that never left him: that he was unwanted, living “by mistake. He moves to Thessaloniki as a young man and then leaves Greece because of the cholera epidemic. No, there was no cholera epidemic. This was a slang expression for the right-wing takeover of Greece. The young Lazos as he is called was left-wing. He lived in various European countries and the US before fleeing to New Guinea when he was engaged in a major smuggling operation when he was broke and was fleeing Interpol. Like Michael Rockefeller he was apparently eaten by cannibals in New Guinea.
Or maybe not. Our narrator is something of an unreliable narrator. He is not necessarily wilful in his unreliability but he picks up information, often gossip, from various sources which are not always reliable and, as in the case of his death, may contradict other sources. As he says Unless we have some kind of real evidence, it’s almost impossible for us to retrace a life spent on the fringes of life— and, more specifically, on the fringes of history.
The key source he would like to see is three sacks of material which Glafkos gave to a US university with the proviso that they could not be opened till twenty-five years after his death. These contain details of his writings while in the US, limiting him to what Glafkos published in Greece before leaving the country. Eventually he does obtain partial access where he learns that Glafkos’ agent Joe, an immigrant from the Balkans like Glafkos, objects to an anti-American book Glafkos has written and how he outsmarts Glafkos. Both get partially caught up in Balkans politics, with the death of Marshal Tito approaching.
Getting back to our tale… Our narrator wants to write a biography of Glafkos. While he is certainly interested in Glafkos – not only is he interested in Glafkos, his wife is interested in Mrs Glafkos (Glafka) and he himself, of course, is very interested in himself. However I too had to work my way into Glafkos’ skin, a fact that often made me live like a kind of Glafkos the Second or Thrassakis Junior..
Our narrator is also interested in money The Danish EU commissioner seems to want to sponsor his work. It turns out that she had an affair with Glsfkos. When he mentioned this, she was not amused. He also seeks funding from the Tigers (a parody of the the Lions Club as Glagkos had been a member. When he is required to sign a document saying that he has never been and will never be a member of the Communist Party he refuses, though a compromise is later found.
He himself recognised that he was living in the wrong time. He was wrong for his time. He often does not seem to fit in.
This book is somewhat chaotic as we jump about from various parts of Glafkos’ life, his life abroad and his uneasy return when there is a general amnesty (why do I feel so foreign? So out of it) and I returned, you might say, like a stranger to a world stranger than I. Everything was inconceivably familiar and yet at the same time inconceivably distant—a hard thing to explain. Im not talking about the people. I expected to find them changed. But the books? How did even the books manage to change? Clearly the Greece he left is not the Greece he returns to but then it is not only Greece has changed but he has changed too.
A lot of the book gives us glimpses into his notebooks which seem to consist mainly of rambling about his life and life in general. We also get summaries of some of his stories which, of course are far less interesting than reading the stories themselves. Many of them are set abroad, primarily in Italy, and often feature a femme fatale. There is one about a Russian émigré who dreams of returning to his home town of Odesa, clearly mirroring Glafkos’ desire to return to Greece, One interesting one however is about his various encounters wth taxi drivers. I must admit that I have often (though by no means always) found taxi drivers to be worldly wise on my travels as these Greek ones seem to be.
But he goes back to Berlin. He felt like a Christmas tree in the middle of an empty square, weighed down with coloured lights and fake snow. He becomes a drug user and gets mixed up with drug dealers and the Ustaše not a happy combination and it does not turn out well.
The same could be said for the biographer/narrator. He seems to get too closely entangled with Glafkos and his life and, at times struggles to differentiate between the two of them. I was a man with two hearts—mine and Glafkos’s. Now that his has stopped beating, I find myself facing the difficulty of landing with just one engine running. Moreover he is well aware that what he is writing is not always coherent. know I’ve lost my reader’s trust: Who knows the reader must be wondering, (and rightfully so) what this biographer will cook up for us next?. He ends They shut me in a sanitarium for a few weeks, for my own good, until I could pull myself together.
As he rightfully says the reader must be wondering, what this biographer will cook up for us next. The book is chaotic, and messy and jumps about all over the place. It is not always clear what is going on and when it is there are bits you will be tempted to skip over. Nevertheless it is an interesting book as we follow the complex story ofmGlafkos and the equally complex story of his biographer trying to tell his story.
Publishing history
First published in 1996 by Livanis
First English translation in 2002 by Seven Stories Press
Translated by Karen Emmerich