The Sapphire Elixir F Voutsakis 9780615630274 Books
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Lambros Lambrou leaves home for fabled Anatolia and the Sea of Marmara. He marries a local girl and is about to begin a family when repatriation is decreed under the Treaty of Lausanne. Forcibly returned to Greece, he stakes a claim upon an ancient cliff-top mooring appearing on no map and overlooking a mysterious lake in Macedonia. Once settled there, he obsesses over building a water pumping station to deliver the elixir of progress to his primitive village. But the leaders of the village incite distention and thwart his plan. Then Lazaros Zervas arrives. A prodigal American, reveling in his contrived asceticism, Lazaros lives in a cave high above the lake, spending his days composing music and arcane commentaries on Origen, reconstructing the polyphony of Renaissance masters and secretly penning the local priest's incomprehensible sermons. When the American offers his land as a conduit for the water, a feud engulfs the village just as war is about to engulf all of Greece. Neither love’s amorphous lightning nor calamities of nature or foreign occupation can dissuade the politics of thirst and the boiling blood of feud.
The Sapphire Elixir F Voutsakis 9780615630274 Books
Stories, memoirs and novels about the Greek immigrant experience in America are many and often exquisitely told as in N. Gage’s seminal memoir A Place For Us. F. Voutsakis takes his readers on a much less expected journey in the beginning of the 20th century in his eloquent new novel, The Sapphire Elixir, Lazaros Zervas, a prodigal American of Greek heritage, abandons his comfortable life in his birthplace of Philadelphia, and after a circuitous trip through Europe, he settles in a forsaken corner of Western Macedonia, from where his ancestors came and where his father had inherited a piece of land, high above a lake and close to Lathra, a small village spread around its shores.As Lazaros spends his time in his cave-like abode reading philosophy and listening or composing classical music, the villagers live a much simpler intellectual life according to the seasons and the church calendar. They, too, are transplants, who ended up there after, in most cases, treacherous journeys chased away from their homes and properties in Anatolia and Asia Minor. It is early 1920s when the Balkan wars, the catastrophe of Smyrna, the founding of present day Turkey, cause suffering convulsions and create the conditions of repatriation for thousands of Greeks to the land of their ancestors, yet a land they didn’t know. The few clans that settled in the shores of Lake Vegoritis, some by way of Cyprus, Smyrna, or Istanbul, some from the neighboring region of Ipiros, couldn’t be more different from one another in their understanding of the value of progress and in dealing with the challenges of life in flux. The precious gift of the lake water becomes an object of contention when two headstrong villagers spar about its wise use and manage to drag most of the residents into a protracted antagonism from which nothing good can come.
An array of diverse characters animate the story as a brewing feud boils over when the American offers his land as a conduit for the water. Just as the reader is about to think that this would facilitate the resolution of the conflict, the resentments that have divided the village fester and erupt into destruction. Dozens of characters, richly drawn with the grooves of time and hardship etched on their faces, inhabit a dreamy world, at times sweet, at times nightmarish, yet always affecting. They compose a tightly woven tapestry of transplanted souls who try to set roots in a harsh land and create allegiances in a shifting economic and political landscape, lushly painted in all its pettiness and grandness.
The Epirot family man, Lambros Lambrou, who seeks to bring to his village the modern convenience and great benefit of running water sourced from the lake, is a deceptively simple man, whom we follow from his youth to his grandfatherhood. Lambros provides the link to events fictitious and historical that span over 50 years of Greek life through national disasters of wars and poverty.
The orphan Cypriot, Avram Karangelos, who survived a collective disaster in Smyrna but not the personal one of his wife’s tragic death in the hands of her brother, is driven to take revenge when he realizes that the authorities won’t take the task of finding the murderer of his beloved wife seriously. A complicated character, Avram opposes progress through technology and provides in the plot the antagonist who sews animosity and suspicion of the Epirot’s plan until he finds his own tragic end as a fugitive in the war-torn Balkans.
The American lives as a recluse with his intellectual pursuits and finds fertile teaching ground for his ideas in the only cultivated mind of the village, the Epirot’s cousin Danae Dranias, who preserves his legacy all the way to the land of his birth when she makes America home.
To those who know Greece and its peculiarities, a certain familiarity flows through the novel that confirms the authenticity of the place and its people, in all their earthiness and mundaneness, despite an air of formality provided by the detached but keenly observant eye of the author. That extends also to the Philadelphia area of the ‘70s.
To those who do not have knowledge of the areas, the novel is enlightening on subjects of music, religion, philosophy, aesthetics, literature, and cultural ethnicity, all unfolded in a diorama that, depending on the vantage point, pans and expands in time with remarkable elasticity. Although one uncovers a treasure trove of cultural information in its folds, the book is ultimately about love of one’s family and a place to call home. It is a philosophical and often unexpectedly humorous reverie to savor for its content and its style.
It takes a lot of characters to create a village and Frank Voutsakis was happy to oblige. Like a demi god who enjoys the kneading of new human figures for baking, Voutsakis gives us an astonishing number of real people, and as a master puppeteer he keeps them expertly suspended in mid air awaiting their return to do their complicated dance on solid ground. The story keeps giving even when a conflict has been resolved or a hero has died. When a main character meets his demise half way into the narrative in true Euripides fashion, the story doesn’t spatter or die there. The character keeps living in the psyche of those he influenced and in the genes of a son, pointing us to the continuity of humanity and alluding to the existence of hope.
Nothing is conventional in this novel. From the musicality of the highly textured language, to the uncommon characters, to the twists and turns of the narrative form, the writer breaks new ground all the way to the enigmatic epilogue leaving the reader wondering if all that was realistically constructed was only a powerful mirage. The voyage to the dusty roads of the lakeside town of Lathra is long and full of adventure. But if that were not what the reader expected, Lathra did not disappoint. The marvelous journey and the reward of meeting so many of its inhabitants and their neighbors, who seem to revel in struggle as refugees in their own land, was what Lathra had to offer. Go on, read slowly; enjoy the wryness of humor, the vividness of imagery, and the keenness of observation, while savoring the language and the ideas along the way.
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Tags : The Sapphire Elixir [F. Voutsakis] on Amazon.com. *FREE* shipping on qualifying offers. Lambros Lambrou leaves home for fabled Anatolia and the Sea of Marmara. He marries a local girl and is about to begin a family when repatriation is decreed under the Treaty of Lausanne. Forcibly returned to Greece,F. Voutsakis,The Sapphire Elixir,Thedesna Press,0615630278,Fiction - General,Fiction Literary,Literary,Modern & contemporary fiction (post c 1945)
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The Sapphire Elixir F Voutsakis 9780615630274 Books Reviews
This book was hard to put down. Very rich characters on every page and even richer vocabulary. The imagery of the Greek countryside will make you want to proffer your credit card and book a trip there immediately! One underlying theme of ecological accountability and responsibility for natural resources is very timely and spoke to me personally. The all-too-familiar theme of, `fear of change' will be very relatable for many. A great and challenging read, one you may find yourself re-reading just to relish each interesting character and each beautiful view of the lake. Read on...
The Sapphire Elixir was an all around fantastic read. The hooks and excitement of a page-turner are melded with a level of artistic prose that truly lifts the spirit. The novel's setting-- a peripheral Greek village-- is masterfully brought alive to the reader until he is metamorphosed into another villager, scraping to understand his significance in the turbulent world surrounding him. The author's exploration of the emotions and psyche of the characters is intriguing, and makes The Sapphire Elixir a novel that could be read time and time again.
As the displaced people in this book try to find their place in life many seek stability by blocking change -- or what others consider progress. But the turbulent political events bring about violent changes from which no family escapes unscathed. The level of detail is amazing and brings alive the characters and the Greek village life by a beautiful lake.
Although very tragic events take place the story telling remains entertaining --at times funny, and yet quite philosophical. Those with roots in this region of the world will find this book a treasure. For others this is a fascinating trip in time and place.
This book is a significant literary accomplishment. I will put it on my bookshelf next to Robert Penn Warren's `A Place to Come To'--a book that I have enjoyed reading and re-reading for its depth of character, storyline, literary style and candid description of human pathos. The writing in `The Sapphire Elixir' is of such extraordinary quality that the lives and loves and feuds of the people populating the off-the-beaten-track setting (early twentieth-century Greece) provide a reflection of human nature itself. The story is a morality play of sorts, but it's not limited by any strict metaphorical construct.
There is also a wealth of cultural information in the novel--ethnic, artistic, musical, religious, literary, philosophical, linguistic. It will delight those who want to read something of substance, something that will make one say, "I didn't know that--and I'm interested in learning more." Footnotes define some of the transliterated local words, and these add to, and do not detract from, the storyline. In fact, although I struggled to keep track of all the characters (I tend to be naturally weak that way), I found that I could keep reading the story because there were continuously new and interesting turns of events which renewed the storyline and rose above the identities of the characters themselves.
Like Penn Warren, the author of `The Sapphire Elixir' has an ear for musicality in the written word (a truth which is inescapable from the storyline), and this skill has formed round and substantive paragraphs that collectively generate a symphonic sweep of storyline. This book deserves a wide readership.
Stories, memoirs and novels about the Greek immigrant experience in America are many and often exquisitely told as in N. Gage’s seminal memoir A Place For Us. F. Voutsakis takes his readers on a much less expected journey in the beginning of the 20th century in his eloquent new novel, The Sapphire Elixir, Lazaros Zervas, a prodigal American of Greek heritage, abandons his comfortable life in his birthplace of Philadelphia, and after a circuitous trip through Europe, he settles in a forsaken corner of Western Macedonia, from where his ancestors came and where his father had inherited a piece of land, high above a lake and close to Lathra, a small village spread around its shores.
As Lazaros spends his time in his cave-like abode reading philosophy and listening or composing classical music, the villagers live a much simpler intellectual life according to the seasons and the church calendar. They, too, are transplants, who ended up there after, in most cases, treacherous journeys chased away from their homes and properties in Anatolia and Asia Minor. It is early 1920s when the Balkan wars, the catastrophe of Smyrna, the founding of present day Turkey, cause suffering convulsions and create the conditions of repatriation for thousands of Greeks to the land of their ancestors, yet a land they didn’t know. The few clans that settled in the shores of Lake Vegoritis, some by way of Cyprus, Smyrna, or Istanbul, some from the neighboring region of Ipiros, couldn’t be more different from one another in their understanding of the value of progress and in dealing with the challenges of life in flux. The precious gift of the lake water becomes an object of contention when two headstrong villagers spar about its wise use and manage to drag most of the residents into a protracted antagonism from which nothing good can come.
An array of diverse characters animate the story as a brewing feud boils over when the American offers his land as a conduit for the water. Just as the reader is about to think that this would facilitate the resolution of the conflict, the resentments that have divided the village fester and erupt into destruction. Dozens of characters, richly drawn with the grooves of time and hardship etched on their faces, inhabit a dreamy world, at times sweet, at times nightmarish, yet always affecting. They compose a tightly woven tapestry of transplanted souls who try to set roots in a harsh land and create allegiances in a shifting economic and political landscape, lushly painted in all its pettiness and grandness.
The Epirot family man, Lambros Lambrou, who seeks to bring to his village the modern convenience and great benefit of running water sourced from the lake, is a deceptively simple man, whom we follow from his youth to his grandfatherhood. Lambros provides the link to events fictitious and historical that span over 50 years of Greek life through national disasters of wars and poverty.
The orphan Cypriot, Avram Karangelos, who survived a collective disaster in Smyrna but not the personal one of his wife’s tragic death in the hands of her brother, is driven to take revenge when he realizes that the authorities won’t take the task of finding the murderer of his beloved wife seriously. A complicated character, Avram opposes progress through technology and provides in the plot the antagonist who sews animosity and suspicion of the Epirot’s plan until he finds his own tragic end as a fugitive in the war-torn Balkans.
The American lives as a recluse with his intellectual pursuits and finds fertile teaching ground for his ideas in the only cultivated mind of the village, the Epirot’s cousin Danae Dranias, who preserves his legacy all the way to the land of his birth when she makes America home.
To those who know Greece and its peculiarities, a certain familiarity flows through the novel that confirms the authenticity of the place and its people, in all their earthiness and mundaneness, despite an air of formality provided by the detached but keenly observant eye of the author. That extends also to the Philadelphia area of the ‘70s.
To those who do not have knowledge of the areas, the novel is enlightening on subjects of music, religion, philosophy, aesthetics, literature, and cultural ethnicity, all unfolded in a diorama that, depending on the vantage point, pans and expands in time with remarkable elasticity. Although one uncovers a treasure trove of cultural information in its folds, the book is ultimately about love of one’s family and a place to call home. It is a philosophical and often unexpectedly humorous reverie to savor for its content and its style.
It takes a lot of characters to create a village and Frank Voutsakis was happy to oblige. Like a demi god who enjoys the kneading of new human figures for baking, Voutsakis gives us an astonishing number of real people, and as a master puppeteer he keeps them expertly suspended in mid air awaiting their return to do their complicated dance on solid ground. The story keeps giving even when a conflict has been resolved or a hero has died. When a main character meets his demise half way into the narrative in true Euripides fashion, the story doesn’t spatter or die there. The character keeps living in the psyche of those he influenced and in the genes of a son, pointing us to the continuity of humanity and alluding to the existence of hope.
Nothing is conventional in this novel. From the musicality of the highly textured language, to the uncommon characters, to the twists and turns of the narrative form, the writer breaks new ground all the way to the enigmatic epilogue leaving the reader wondering if all that was realistically constructed was only a powerful mirage. The voyage to the dusty roads of the lakeside town of Lathra is long and full of adventure. But if that were not what the reader expected, Lathra did not disappoint. The marvelous journey and the reward of meeting so many of its inhabitants and their neighbors, who seem to revel in struggle as refugees in their own land, was what Lathra had to offer. Go on, read slowly; enjoy the wryness of humor, the vividness of imagery, and the keenness of observation, while savoring the language and the ideas along the way.
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