What lies beneath the idyll

Picture a ramshackle Greek village of no more than 30 houses, a place so far off the beaten track that the government is planning to build a dam on its site and relocate the inhabitants. Envision a crumbling church, a tavern, a barbershop, a butchery, a coffee shop, a dilapidated train station, whitewashed houses and a cast of variegated eccentrics including a sour, narrow-minded, but not entirely unsympathetic priest; a lonely spinster given to afternoon dreams; a clerk who tries to teach his parrot to recite Homer; a landowner so cruel and rapacious, he’s a veritable mini-Stalin; and a widower so crushed by his wife’s death in giving birth to twin daughters that he keeps the girls chained up like dogs.

The 19 linked stories that make up Panos Karnezis’ noteworthy fiction debut, “Little Infamies,” reveal a grim bedrock of poverty, superstition, filth, mean-spiritedness and hardship beneath the deceptively picturesque surface of a quaint village. Innocence, sweetness and hope exist, but they often prove to be delusions. Love, when it does occur, all too easily turns into poisonous hate. Certainly, no one could accuse Karnezis, a native of Greece now living in England, of indulging in rosy nostalgia, although perhaps his warts-and-all portraiture is in keeping with a newer style of nostalgia (raw, harsh, unsparing, reveling in the nastier side) currently favored in literary circles.

Although these stories are set in -- and pungently evoke -- a village in Greece, Karnezis chose to write them in his second language, English. (A Greek translation by the author is to be published in Greece.) He is a deft stylist: clear and direct, yet subtly ironic -- a style well-suited to the short story. And, like many of the masters of this genre -- Guy de Maupassant, Flannery O’Connor, Eudora Welty -- Karnezis is adept at delivering one startling surprise after another.

The book begins with an earthquake and ends with a flood. In the first story, the earthquake disinters two children’s coffins filled with rocks, causing the local priest, Father Yerasimo, to set off on an angry quest to discover who tricked him years ago into reciting burial prayers for stones.

The real story is far more horrifying than the priest’s notion of a sin. It is the story of a man whose love for his wife turns to hatred for the twin daughters she dies giving birth to. Pretending to the priest that the girls died too, he fills their coffins with stones and locks the infants in a cellar to punish them for their “crime” of “matricide.” Through the locked trapdoor, “he would ignore their pleading grunts as if they were the whines of a dog. Once a day he threw them his leftovers, filled their bowls with water and promptly birched them in order to teach them obedience from an early age.”

For 11 years, until they escape, the girls are given no clothing but dog collars, taught no language. Worse yet, we learn: “Their existence was a sinister yet delicious secret shared by everyone in the village apart from the priest, the doctor and the civil guardsmen. Almost every day someone would ... bring the widower, who stubbornly refused to remarry, a leg of ham, a plate of home-made dumplings or a basket of eggs. The presents were obvious excuses.... Nikiforo would not disappoint his uninvited guests. He used to take the children out of the cellar in their collars and leads, and have them perform like monkeys. They never failed to please.”

A better life, albeit a strange one, awaits the abused girls after they break free in this bizarre and constantly surprising opening story, “A Funeral of Stones,” which is also the longest in the collection. The second longest is the penultimate story, “On the First Day of Lent,” an intriguingly subtle, if less polished and more amorphous, account of a prison warden who impulsively grants a day’s leave to a prisoner, a small-time but incorrigible thief and con man, who takes more than full advantage of this brief window of opportunity to take care of what might euphemistically be called some unfinished business.

Some of the intervening stories are slight: one or two of them, like “Jeremiad,” in which an elderly pensioner dies of waiting at a pension office, are little more than set-pieces. In many, we are shown the exigencies of life in a poor village, where even the mayor may feel he is forced to marry off his unwilling daughter to someone with a little more money. And when justice -- or something near it -- is occasionally achieved, it’s always by subterfuge, as in “The Day of the Beast” and “Medical Ethics,” two particularly satisfying yet disturbing stories featuring Dr. Panteleon, the village’s admirable, if less than fully qualified, physician. Lighter notes are provided by one of the town clerks, the bird-loving bachelor Nectario, who, in one story, attempts to construct a pair of wings that will enable him to fly and, in another, less ambitiously tries to teach his parrot to recite Homer.

Perhaps the oddest story is “The Hunters in Winter.” Unlike the other stories, it is narrated in the first person plural, “we,” by a group of hunters, outsiders who happen upon the village by accident during a winter storm. Oddly, the hunters find the villagers friendly and helpful -- not exactly the impression the reader had been getting from most of the other stories.

Odder still is the way that the hunters proceed to treat -- or, rather mistreat -- their hosts. Seemingly, there’s no escape from exploitation, inside the village or in the world beyond.

In the final story, “The Legend of Atlantis,” the villagers try to fight the government’s plan to turn their land into a dam and resettle them. Somehow, by this point, we -- and they -- almost welcome the prospect of a flood to put an end to all the poverty, ignorance, viciousness, rapacity, vengeance and sheer foolishness that Karnezis has so memorably depicted. But if there’s a grim poetic justice in the idea of burying this village under a flood of water, there’s also an ineffable sadness and sympathy that wells up in us as we watch them confronting the reality they’ve been trying so hard to ignore.