Warped reality amid myriad reflections

Reading “The Few Things I Know About Glafkos Thrassakis” is like wandering into a never-ending house of mirrors. From the first distorted image we encounter, we try to sort out what’s real. Each room offers new twists on reality, revealing an ever-widening series of false reflections, a massive artifice designed to blur whatever distinction we think exists between reality and fiction.

The novel, which was first published in 1978 and has been reworked by Vassilis Vassilikos (one of Greece’s most acclaimed writers and author of the 1967 novel “Z”) many times since (only recently translated into English), is based on a fascinating premise. The unnamed narrator, through whose consciousness we enter the story, is researching and writing a biography of a fictitious Greek novelist, Glafkos Thrassakis, who’d been exiled from Greece for many years. Much of Thrassakis’ work had been left incomplete or unpublished at the time of his death. (He was said to have been devoured by cannibals in New Guinea; the cannibals, shortly thereafter, Thrassakis’ biographer reports, became vegetarians.) Prior to his tragic demise, Thrassakis sent three sacks of his writings to an American university with instructions that they remain sealed for 25 years in the case of his untimely death.

Broken into three sections, “The Few Things I Know About Glafkos Thrassakis” considers questions of identity and the politics of writing. The first section focuses on the historical, personal and political background of Thrassakis and the narrator’s relationship to him. As he strives to find new material on Thrassakis, he travels to the United States to plead for the sacks to be opened and finds himself confusing his own existence with the great writer’s. He goes into psychotherapy to remind himself that he and Thrassakis are distinct individuals. But the lines continue to blur when we learn that the narrator’s wife is researching a biography on Thrassakis’ wife.

Many of the details attributed to Thrassakis, we soon realize, parallel autobiographical details from the life of Vassilikos. Thrassakis, for example, grew up during the German occupation of Greece and was exiled during the military dictatorship of 1967-74, as was the author Vassilikos.

The second part takes a more satiric turn when the narrator is finally given permission to read the contents of one of the sealed sacks. He explicates, among other stories found in the sack, a story of Thrassakis’, “Lazarus’s Return,” the tale of an exiled writer who becomes a baker in his new land, feeding the people sentences made of bread. “And so, in eating, people read.” In mordant parody of literary criticism, the narrator writes synopses of Thrassakis’ stories and critiques them, conjecturing details of the author’s life and how those details informed his art. The story lines contained in this section, though crisply written, remain, alas, only outlines, a few steps removed from being actual short stories. As a result, this rather dry listing of stories regrettably removes us from the life of the narrative.

In the final section, Vassilikos seeks to tie together the disparate parts presented earlier: the stories of the sealed sacks, the life of Thrassakis and the life of the narrator. Here the mirrors compound and shift. Perhaps, the narrator considers, Thrassakis wasn’t eaten by cannibals after all but was murdered in West Berlin as the result of intra-Macedonian politics. Perhaps -- as readers might wonder (and indeed as does the narrator) -- the narrator is Thrassakis himself. Perhaps Thrassakis exists only in the narrator’s imagination, which leaves the narrator wondering, “ [W]ho, or what, was I?”

Challenging to read, this ambitious, if sometimes flawed, novel is well served by Vassilikos’ stunning prose -- “[T]he sea’s embrace does not hold me, for I, expanding, use her juttings of land like long nails to clean out the ears of seashells, through which to hear more clearly the ocean’s roar.” -- and once we leave this hall of mirrors, we can never see the world of writing and politics quite the same.