I did not read this book as if it were literary fiction or to be taken literally. I read it more like a fable or tale, where trees and animals can have POVs and not everything is concrete-set in rationality. (Other readers who disliked the book seem to have wanted it to stick to human-centric reason). A creative and fanciful approach to the brutal and difficult story of civil war: Greeks vs. Turks and the battle over Cypress. I really appreciated that nature was given as much a stage as all the humans and their issues. For me, this made the book much more than the standard trauma-immigrant story that seems to be so popular these days.
QUOTES
Opening lines:
Island:
Once upon a memory, at the far end of the Mediterranean Sea, there lay an island so beautiful and blue that the many travelers, pilgrims, crusaders and merchants who fell in love with it either wanted never to leave or tried to tow it with hemp ropes all the way back to their own countries. Legends, perhaps. But legends are there to tell us what history has forgotten
So yes, carobs are strong. I give them credit for that. But, unlike us figs, they are devoid of emotion. They are cold, pragmatic and lacking in soul. There is a perfectionism to them that gets on my nerves. Their seeds are almost always identical in weight and size, so uniform that in the olden times merchants used them to weigh gold – that’s where the word ‘carat’ comes from.
Figs are sensual, soft, mysterious, emotional, lyrical, spiritual, self-contained and introverted. Carobs like things to be unsentimental, material, practical, measurable. Ask them about matters of the heart and you will get no response. Not even a flutter. If a carob tree were to tell this story, I can assure you it would have been very different to mine.
Just as all trees perennially communicate, compete and cooperate, both above and below the ground, so too do stories germinate, grow and come into bloom upon each other’s invisible roots.
From the shrubs in the distance came the buzzing song of cicadas. Kostas knew there were some cicada species that could sing at extremely high frequencies, and perhaps they were doing so right now. Nature was always talking, telling things, though the human ear was too limited to hear them.
Perhaps in a world bound with rules and regulations that made little sense, and usually privileged a few over the many, madness was the only true freedom. In a little while, they were summoned in to see the exorcist.
Perhaps a Eurasian skylark, swooping into the night, following its companions, but slowing down at the last second and flying at a tangent just above the reach of the net. What had saved it and not others? The cruelty of life rested not only on its injustices, injuries and atrocities, but also in the randomness of it all. ‘It’s only humans that do this,’ said Kostas. ‘Animals don’t. Plants don’t. Yes, trees sometimes overshadow other trees, compete for space, water and nutrients, battle for survival ... Yes, insects eat each other. But mass murder for personal profit, that’s peculiar to our species.’
After all, the world is full of immigrants, runaways, exiles ... Encouraged, you break free and travel as far as you can, then one day you look back and realize it was coming with you all along, like a shadow. Everywhere we go, it’ll follow us, this city, this island.’
‘The world is unfair,’ said Meryem. ‘If a stone falls on an egg, it is bad for the egg; if an egg falls on a stone, it is still bad for the egg.’
Women, at least where I come from, and for personal reasons of their own, have, time and again, turned themselves into native flora. Defne, Dafne, Daphne ... Daring to reject Apollo, Daphne became a laurel. Her skin hardened into a protective bark, her arms stretched into slender branches and her hair unfurled into silky foliage while, as Ovid tells us, ‘her feet, so swift a moment ago, stuck in slow-growing roots’. Whereas Daphne was transformed into a tree in order to avoid love, I transmuted into a tree in order to hold on to love.
Last lines of book:
"But I know and I trust that, any moment now, my beloved Kostas Kazantzakis will come out to the garden with a spade in his hand, perhaps wearing his old navy parka again, the one we bought together from a vintage shop on Portobello Road, and he will dig me out and pull me up, holding me gently in his arms, and behind his beautiful eyes, engraved in his soul, they will still be there, the remnants of an island at the far end of the Mediterranean Sea, the remains of our love.”