When he has suffered his own bouts of clinical depression, he
has had to remind himself of the love of those around him.
His novel The Book of Katerina, a fictionalised account of his mother’s life-long struggle with bipolar disorder, was first published in Greek in 2013 and became a huge success, selling 50,000 copies. It’s now being launched in English (translated by Claire Papamichail) by Wales-based Parthian Books as both a paperback and an audiobook narrated by Anna Savva, otherwise known as Lugaretzia of The Durrells.
It was a great pleasure for me to be the editor of the English translation, and so I thought I'd write something about it here to coincide with the British mental health awareness week.
Acclaimed British author Glen James Brown has called The
Book of Katerina: ‘a gleefully sardonic novel about illness and family, and
how we can never quite cure ourselves of either.’
Although it’s an attempt to understand Katerina’s torments, it’s an unstoppably energetic and entertaining read as with earthy, no-holds-barred humour she observes the saga of her extended family’s ups and downs in the city of Thessaloniki over three generations.
There are fascinating glimpses of the backdrop. At the dawn of
the twentieth century in Turkey, Katerina’s poor Jewish grandmother ‘with hair
as red as the beard of Judas’ meets a Greek merchant who, a good Christian, agrees
to marry the ‘Christ-killer’ but asks her to forswear her true name and lineage
‘or rather demands; men rarely asked for things in those days’.
Thanks to their hard work, at the start of the 1920s they are
practically well-off, the children at a good school with piano lessons and
foreign languages. ‘And then the Asia Minor Catastrophe happens and they
suddenly find themselves in Upper Town, Thessaloniki, without two pennies to rub
together.’
After their family dreams are blighted in an instant, the next
generation pursue material wealth above everything else – including genuine
love. While there are already signs of the hereditary illness that will haunt
the family, the narrator also holds the lack of love between parents and
siblings accountable for many of their problems.
‘When four siblings out of four end up on medication by the
age of forty,’ says Katerina, ‘something very bad must have happened during
their childhood.’
She then seems to take things to the other extreme, smothering
her own son with love as he is growing up, to the detriment of her marriage.
It was years after his mother’s death that Auguste decided he
had to write the book as a kind of love letter to his mother, recreating her as
a fictional character. It opens with the scene when he found her dead, stark
naked on her bed, having committed suicide. He was in his early twenties when
his mother took her life following years of struggling with mental health
issues.
She says, ‘I’m giving Petros the biggest gift within my
powers: I shall release him from the lifelong duty of nursing a mother who’s constantly
deteriorating, spare him the years of dementia that are sure to come… I know
this will destroy him, that he’ll need years and years to recover from the blow…’
And then she takes 400 pills.
No wonder that when the book was adapted for the stage, the play
left the audience in tears.
When he decided to write the book, he says:
‘I had to recall the exact timbre of her
humour, the fieriness of her fury, her tenderness and her despair. It was
indeed cathartic, but also painful – which is why I wrote the book in white
heat, over a couple of frantic weeks.
‘Back when I wrote the book, it seemed to me way too bleak to be enjoyable. But it turns out I was wrong.’
The
Book of Katerina – Parthian Books
The author will be presenting the book at the Mani Literary Festival in October.
Greek Author Auguste Corteau Breaks into the World Market (greekreporter.com)
