01/25/2016
In Ikonomou’s timely novel, the human fallout of the Greek economic recession is writ large. In these 15 stories of poverty and institutional disfunction, Ikonomou’s heroes—the laboring, often-unemployed masses crushed by debt and hunger—seek solace from their debilitating realties in memory (“Charcoal Mustache”), dreams (“Foreign. Exotic.”), and liquor (“The Blood of the Onion”), only to come up against an implacable and corrupt system that erodes their humanity, breaking up families and repossessing property. Concerned with the bottom rungs of the social ladder, pieces such as “Mao,” about a young, cat-loving vigilante in a crime-infested neighborhood, or “Placard and Broomstick,” in which a grocery stocker mounts a feeble protest against unsafe working conditions, cover an astonishing range. Then there’s the centerpiece, a daring experiment called “The Things They Carried,” which references the famous Tim O’Brien story (and book) of the same name, except that Ikonomou’s peasants carry nothing but unpaid bills and “the weight of their weakness, the weight of time, of the sicknesses that ate at their bodies.” These stories add up to a panorama of the human spirit under siege and a searing indictment of the failures to reform the Greek infrastructure. (Mar.)
In Ikonomou’s timely novel, the human fallout of the Greek economic recession is writ large. . . . Concerned with the bottom rungs of the social ladder, [these] pieces . . . cover an astonishing range . . . These stories add up to a panorama of the human spirit under siege and a searing indictment of the failures to reform the Greek infrastructure.”
—Publishers Weekly
“[Ikonomou’s] characters might feel like they are suffering private tragedies, but SOMETHING WILL HAPPEN repeatedly calls our attention to the subtle human connections that remain . . . Karen Emmerich deserves special praise for her translation of Ikonomou’s charming, vernacular, and energetic prose.”
—Bookforum
“This collection is a kind of Dubliners for the postcrisis generation and a lament for the marginalized inhabitants of neighborhoods around the shipping district of Piraeus. Ikonomou succeeds at immersing the reader, through a panoramic stream-of-consciousness method of narration, into fifteen lives where “pain and fear come later, when the wound cools . . . Ikonomou is an author of substance as much as style, and Something Will Happen, You’ll See is a stunning, if somewhat bleak, sketch of a country in flux.”
—World Literature Today
“Ikonomou’s Something Will Happen, You’ll See depicts many lives, of all ages, that have been blighted by financial hardship. The book stands with Rafael Chirbes’s On the Edge as one of the remarkable literary interpretations of the recent global downturn.”
—Barnes & Noble Review
“Stylistically and thematically reminiscent of Raymond Carver . . . Set in contemporary Greece, these stories focus on characters struggling to maintain their dignity, relationships and self-worth in a failing society.”
—Shelf Awareness
“These stories are pitch-perfect, with sullen anger, wit, sharp humor, and tragicomedy captured in sharply crafted scenes that linger in the memory . . . Karen Emmerich is quickly establishing herself as one of our finest contemporary translators from Greek to English . . . If someone is interested in understanding the very human face of Greece’s working class, and discovering a very talented and unsettling writer, I’d say buy this book.”
—Stephanos Papadopoulos in Los Angeles Review of Books
“Something Will Happen, You'll See presents a vision that deftly combines economic and existential crisis, showing how the two are never far apart . . . Ikonomou’s writing brilliantly and sensitively conveys hope, fear, and everything in between. He realizes that the mind plays games when faced with something it can’t bear to see. Ikonomou forces it, and us, to look. These stories give back to the world what is lost in the TV rendition of a country’s suffering. These fictions are the news, writ atomically, or cellularly, character by character, progressing one gesture and emotional tick at a time. The loss of the individuals behind any news story is a crime. Ikonomou undoes the crime by bodying forth the tragedy.”
—Anne Germanacos in Los Angeles Review of Books
“In sixteen inter-connected short stories, Christos Ikonomou gives us a mural of the lives of people struggling in the working-class neighbourhoods on the outskirts of Athens, the fishing docks and boatyards near the port . . . Karen Emmerich’s outstanding translation makes sure not only that the lyrical and the rough both survive in the English version, but that the austere and the jumbled, elements which form the Modern Greek language, are both present—this is one of those rare renditions where nothing is lost.”
—The Times Literary Supplement
“This poignant collection of short stories masterfully explores the soul of the Greek people amidst economic crisis. The stories are unique and raw and delve deep into the emotional landscape of unemployment, hunger and despair but include fragments of dark humor and attempts at preserving dignity. From a laid off worker who cannot provide food for his son to a woman whose boyfriend steals her nest egg to a group of sick old men awaiting the opening of a clinic, we are privy to the innermost thoughts and mundane acts of everyday people who are grappling
“A gripping collection of short stories . . . Christos Ikonomou has already been hailed in the Italian press as a 'Greek Faulkner,' a description that conveys the emotional power but not the restraint or precision of his prose.”
—Mark Mazower, The Nation
★ 01/01/2016
SHORT STORIESA woman finds peace in the simple task of washing lettuce as she considers the latest man to abandon her. A man angrily swears that this will be the last time he fetches his younger brother, once again badly beaten for his political protests. A young man whose sister was gang-raped moodily stands guard in the neighborhood, at first winning the admiration but finally the scorn of the neighbors. These are some of the stories in award-winning Greek author Ikonomou's latest collection, and if they're sometimes wrenchgingly brutal, they're always exactingly and beautifully told, delivering a sense of the hardscrabble lives in currently beleagured Greece—or anywhere, for that matter. VERDICT This strong and affecting work is accessible to all readers and will draw fans of Donald Ray Pollack, Claire Vaye Watkins, Bonnie Jo Campbell, and Wells Tower.
2016-02-04
A collection of soul-grindingly bleak stories with the barest glimmers of human resilience. The author of these stories (All Good Things Will Come from the Sea, 2014) makes Raymond Carver read like Anne Tyler. All of them are set in the harbor district of his native Athens, but this is no tourist's Greece. It could be termed a working-class neighborhood, but many of the protagonists are no longer working, and their existence is barely hand-to-mouth, for too often there is nothing in the hand to reach the mouth. Sometimes their jobs have been lost to political upheaval, but there are no political solutions to their existential dilemmas, no party that is better than any other. Occasionally, characters believe that their plights will somehow capture the attention of the media. In the closing story, "Piece By Piece They're Taking My World Away," someone whose home has been lost to eminent domain says, "I'm sure they'll say something on TV. That's something, at least. At some point they'll say something on TV for sure." But the reader who has heard similar hopes from other characters here knows that there will be no media attention, at least not before the story ends, as they invariably do, without resolution, leaving the characters in limbo. Though the opening "Come on Ellie, Feed the Pig" evokes "the smell of the malicious poverty that is slowly and silently and confidently gnawing at Ellie's dreams and strength and life," her situation is better than most. She has some money, if not much, and the worst that seems to happen is a lover's betrayal, as others have betrayed her previously. She hasn't lost anyone close to her in a violent explosion, and there's no sense that the next day she faces homelessness, joblessness, or starvation. So, she's one of the lucky ones. The protagonist of one story, driven to the brink of madness by a friend's shocking workplace death, wants "to write something that would express unspeakable rage and hatred and love and despair all at once." Such sentiments could be the writer's own.
