I was thinking very recently about Nicholas Papandreou, son of the (deceased) Andreas Papandreou, Prime Minister of Greece during much of the 80's and 90's, and so I quickly surfed the web to see if anybody agreed with my opinion about Nick's first novel - A Crowded Heart. Nick P. in my opinion, is a finer writer than his father was a politician; I think the book is a beautiful example of spare, pared-down writing that conveys force and power without ever lurching into hyperbole or overwriting.

I also think the book's sections set in his homeland conveys the country more powerfully than any other writer except the underrated Stratis Haviaras, whose equally poetic first novel, When The Tree Sings, still has the power to evoke a childhood and a way of life that, though it has largely disappeared from Greece, indicates much of the Greek character. Forget Louis de Bernieres - though he managed to convey life on a Greek island convincingly enough, he is too British about the ending in Captain Corelli's Mandolin, and his viewpoint on the civil war is very one-sided.
So far, the books I recommend for people coming to Greece are:
A Crowded Heart - Nick Papandreou
Roumeli- and Mani Patrick Leigh Fermor
Prospero's Cell and Reflections on a Marine Venus by Lawrence Durrell
When the Tree Sings by Stratis Haviaras
The Mermaid Madonna and The Schoolmistresss with the Golden Eyes by Stratis Myrivilis
Salonica: City of Ghosts, by Mark Mazower
Experts (are there any reading this blog???) will observe that all these novels, travel books etc. deal with a Greece that 'no longer exists', at least superficially, but that is precisely the point. Beneath the veneer of the thoroughly contemporary society that is Modern Greece lies something more fundamental, and all these novels, travel books, histories and so on, deal with the fundamentals better than, say, the Colossus of Maroussi by Henry Miller, not my favourite book. Which brings me back to Nick Papandreou. To my surprise, I discover that he is running a writer's workshop on Andros this summer, and even if I could afford it (at $2,850, you've got to be joking), I'm already too late to apply. I'd like to meet the talented writer whose first novel was such a pleasure to read, though I have no doubt we shall not agree about his father. I agreed with his politics, but (like many foreigners) didn't agree with his populist nationalism, which was more akin to the far right than the centre-left, and dragged his country into more pointless confrontations that it could have done without. Allagi - Change, his catchword - was more rhetorical than actual - you feel Greece would have changed whoever was in power. His governments were also dogged by scandal and corruption, but it would be rather naive to think that any government in Greece, let alone anywhere else, were free of such things. However, I risk losing half of my Greek friends by saying so, and anyway, it was none of my business who ran the country; if I didn't like it, I could always go back home...