Arcadia, My Arcadia: A Must Read
by Mary Papoutsy
“Quite often Hellenic Communication Service receives unsolicited books and other materials from authors and publishers. And in nearly every instance, the works have been fine ones, worthy of promotion. We at HCS feel that it is important to assist in the promotion of works by and about Greeks, especially when they hold great promise for enriching our lives and enhancing our understanding of Hellenic culture and history.
Occasionally a work that reaches our desks stands out even among a field of shining stars. And Arcadia, My Arcadia by Nicholas Kokonis is just such a novel. If your gift-giving list for someone of Greek descent can include only one present, make it a purchase of Arcadia, My Arcadia. You won't regret it.
This is a wonderful historical novel about the indomitable Greek spirit of a young man from the mountains of Arcadia, the son of poor village farmers who succeeded against overwhelming odds. In the words of the author, Arcadia, My Arcadia “tells the story of one boy from the dusty poverty of his nameless village to the baffling life of the big city and beyond, as he tried to avoid the fate of his ancestors in the 1950s Arcadia.” Superbly written, with an heroic central figure, the universality of the young boy's struggles—and great personal victories--will deeply touch Hellenic hearts.
Every Greek-American reader can recognize something of his own ancestors and relatives in this epic tale, since the vast majority of immigrants came from a similar background as the central figure: a poor, rural village. It makes no difference where one's ancestral village is located--nestled among the mountains of Epirus, clinging to the stony peaks of Mani, cradled in the Aegean, or even in the fabled idyllic setting of Arcadia--the struggle to survive was the same. The underlying culture, language and religion were the same. And each immigrant had the same burning desire to succeed. For those of us whose lives were made immeasurably better by the enormous sacrifices of these determined and visionary pioneers, it is difficult sometimes to recognize the magnitude and frequency of the sacrifices made by these people. But Arcadia, My Arcadia will help bring these trials into sharp focus, offering us a clearer glimpse into the remarkable natures of our own extraordinary ancestors.
Arcadia, My Arcadia is exactly what all of its reviewers have written—and much more. I especially like the quote by Photis Fournodavlos that Kokonis "took the common life of our country and its scenes and made them a blessing through the literary process and projected them on the international horizon for the entire world to view and admire." Like the Prefect of Arcadia, Mr. Demetrios Konstantopoulos, I too found the book to be a "page-turner." The authorial talent of Dr. Kokonis is evident everywhere throughout this book, making it one of the very best that I have read in a long time. Buy the book. You won't be disappointed.”—Mary Papoutsy
Reading Arcadia, My Arcadia: An Inspirational Experience
By Annie Niemiec, B.A. Saint Joseph’s College, Rensselaer, Indiana
In this article I would like to discuss the impact reading Arcadia, My Arcadia has had on my life personally.
From the first chapter, the work captured me such that I did not want to put the book down. I was mesmerized by the description of the Greek countryside, from the road leading out of town to the country, to the trees, the mountains, the flowers and the sky. Immediately, my mind transformed my thought to a beautiful land, rich with many natural and simple pleasures.
As I continued reading, I was introduced to Angelo Vlahos, the story’s humble main character, who was only a young boy. He was very special and unique, loyal to his family and parents, his upbringing and to a quest for academic excellence. Recognizing his potential for academic greatness, his charismatic country school teacher, Nikos Theoharis, had instilled a confidence in him. With him as a role model, Angelo applied for admittance into the boys’ high school, a school in Polis with traditionally few country students.
Angelo's nobility doesn’t begin and end with his quest for education, though. His devotion to his family touched my heart greatly. He was motivated to achieve so he could help his parents who had so little. Being Arcadian farmers, they were poor but amazing hard workers. They labored from the early hours of the morning to the evening, working for sustenance, for money, for basic necessities—for basic survival. I immediately loved the entire Vlahos family, who they endured so much to help Angelo while trying to survive in Arcadia. When Angelo needed a place to stay in Polis, or food to eat, or money for school supplies, and later in the story, when he needed money to leave for the United States, his family came through for him. They understood the importance of his education, and as a true family, they all pulled together, sacrificed so much and helped one another.
Another wonderful attribute of this novel is the vivid, colorful and captivating characters that Angelo interacts with throughout his years living in Polis. From the students and families he meets as private tutor, to his classmates and school bullies, each character brought so many other facets of the Greek society and culture to the story. Every character went from the book to becoming alive right off the page! They illustrated how different the city lifestyle was and how often people are jaded when in a position of power, or affluent members of society.
There were many stark contrasts in character between Angelo and the “eaters” (people of power and authority) of the city. With every victory Angelo had over them, I celebrated with him. I have never been from or of money. I believe that those with less always become more, because they have a greater drive and greater zest for life. Which reminds me of Pausanias’ statement: “So heaven has assigned to the most lowly things the mastery over things far more esteemed than they” (ARCADIA, xvii).
Along with his drive for excellence, and love of family, was a raw heroism about Angelo that made me automatically love him. He was a righteous young man who developed a sense of moral thinking that would not sway. This heroic sense carried him through the many ups and downs after completing high school and searching for a way to gain entrance into the United States. He went over so many hurdles, obstacles and bumps in the road to be able to leave Greece. He had to exercise patience and perseverance, while being cautious and crafty. It was so wonderful to read that he was finally going to leave!
When the story ended, I was dismayed. I wanted to follow Angelo to the United States, read about his new adventures, find out if he meets his long-lost love Antigone, and know if he ultimately helped his family to live a more comfortable lifestyle. I was honestly sad when the story concluded.
I could never imagine wanting to go somewhere and having to come up with so many documents, depend on so many people for support and have to spend such a huge sum of money! And then to ultimately leave my family, home and everything I knew for a chance at the unknown?
There are many passages and characters within Arcadia, My Arcadia that I have learned from and will take with me in my life. It would be too difficult to just choose a few messages, as this tale enforces so many lessons. I have chosen, therefore, to focus on the story’s impact on me as a person. So often in my own life, I take my education—and the opportunity for an advanced degree—for granted. After reading this book, I found myself turning into a more driven individual. I was taken by Angelo’s drive to become educated. As he stayed on top of his studies, memorized lessons and worked to excel as his class’ top student, I too found myself dedicating a part of my time to studying and retaining knowledge.
I reminisced on how I breezed through classes putting in mediocre effort to just “get by”. I was somewhat ashamed I had cheated myself. Angelo's effort and zeal for knowledge was so honorable and respectable that I found myself mimicking his habits. I enjoyed reading about his studies—they inspired me. If I got the highest grade in a course I am presently taking toward my graduate degree, it is because of that inspiration. I am convinced, now, that I should pursue advanced studies and earn a Masters.
In synopsis, I have never before read a book that became such an inspirational experience for me. Arcadia, My Arcadia is such a wonderfully written and inspirational tale that I can recommended it to all my family, friends and classmates.
One of my favorite parts of the story was when he stole Papa Euthymios’s black book of debts and destroyed it. I think I cried “Hallelujah!” out loud in my room. I felt liberated reading that scene!
I despised the character of Papa Euthymios because he oppressed the people in Angelo's village. Reading about the suffering of the Vlahos family and how they were taken advantage of by the local priest made me cringe. Papa Euthymios was a sad person because of his attitudes. He was very self-centered and failed to lead the people who looked to him as holy! When Angelo destroyed the book, he reached, I think, a new level of excellence and heroism.
Recording life like Willa Cather: Review of Arcadia, My Arcadia
By Dr. William Graddy, Professor Emeritus, Trinity International University
Well credentialed readers and professional writers alike have found Arcadia, My Arcadia appealing for a variety of reasons, many of them quickly recognizable. Nicholas Kokonis’s evocative but precise descriptive powers, the gracefulness of his language, the depth and authenticity of his knowledge of ancient and modern Greece, his warm but sober embrace of its people, legends, religions, and character-all this is abundantly apparent within the first hour of reading. The deepest rewards of the book, though, take shape only in reflection, as one begins to trace the larger contours that emerge in a text that has been sculpted with a skilled hand.
The thematic center of Kokonis’s novel occurs, appropriately enough, at almost the exact mid-point of the story itself. Angelo Vlahos, the central character whose coming-of-age Kokonis sensitively traces, has just begun the fifth of his six-year high school curriculum, and seizes on an otherwise perfunctory assignment as a chance to win a commendation from Grigoris Dzidzikis, the insufferably pompous teacher of Angelo' class in Contemporary Greek: "Write a paragraph or two . . . commenting on the adage, "Et in Arcadia Ego" (Book One, Chapter 17). Completely unknown to the haughty Dzidzikis, Angelo' life and education have converged on exactly the point made in this historic phrase. For this admirable young man, his parents, two sisters, and a handful of others memorably sketched are true Arcadians, peasants who have, like their forebears since the dawn of time, scratched and sucked a living from the soil of a region breathtaking in beauty, but harshly infertile and subject to scorching droughts. A diligent student, Angelo knows that artists since antiquity had seized on this very contrast to create from the literal Arcadia a mythical realm of Edenic perfection, but one touched nonetheless by death, especially the fatal injustices wrought by the corruption of an outside world, urban, wealthy, and deceitful. With a pathos deeply felt but appropriately stiff with painfully acquired learning, Angelo goes to the heart of this contrast, pointing out that the phrase, usually translated as a boast that "Even I have lived in Arcadia," is more accurately rendered as a statement of Death itself, "Even in Arcadia I . . . am present."
This realization, of course, is the lifeblood of all coming-of-age stories, and the merging of this universality with the sharply etched life of one adolescent boy is among Kokonis’s most significant achievements. With remarkably unobtrusive, but ever-alert eyes and ears, Kokonis notes the ironies that turn what should have been a prime learning moment into searing personal humiliation. Dzidzikis, who in a lecture has just lauded writers like Kostis Palamas and Yiannis Psyharis for being "true to their own convictions," for breaking "away from dogmas" to establish "demotic as the official language of contemporary prose," fails Angelo outright for defying authority, and drags him before the school principal, who along with Dzidzikis derides him for having had the cheek to write his essay in "demotic instead of the proper katharevousa," thus vulgarizing "our noble Greek heritage" and furthering "Communist propaganda."
The outrage Angelo feels at such treatment is symptomatic of Arcadia's entire plot. With few exceptions, whatever actions this young man and his family take to live with some vestiges of dignity stir invective and outrage. These injustices flow through every channel of society: foreign and domestic, local and national, sacred and secular. Angelo' mother is not far wrong when she teaches her son early on that the world is made up of two classes, the "eaters" and everyone else, and indeed, Kokonis’s evocation of the relentless, belly-twisting hunger Angelo feels throughout most of these six or so years of his young life is memorable. Given the pervasiveness of such injustice and prejudice, the novel could easily degenerate into sentimentality and stereotypes, but it most certainly does not. Nowhere is this better seen than in Kokonis’s treatment of education itself, a dominant motif in Arcadia. While schooling from secondary level on is clearly used as a tool for preserving the traditional hegemonies of privilege and wealth, Kokonis shows it repeatedly to be a two-edged sword, equipping his hero with the skills and knowledge that lead him, ever so haltingly, toward the passenger plane in the last scene, where this one born Angelos (at one point he changes his name, dropping the "s" to make himself sound more American), this messenger whose heart has always had wings, is finally be able to fly.
As already suggested, Nicholas Kokonis has literary skills worthy of a more experienced writer of fiction. He is particularly adept at showing the often baffling but ultimately rich juxtapositions in Angelo's mind, and even in his peasant family's day-to-day experience, that result as ancient ideals and fears inscribed in Greek myth, in Greek Orthodox Christianity, in folk superstition, and the sheer shrewdness birthed in generations of subsistence living jostle against each other. Kokonis’s ability to record life--to find the remarkable in the ordinary and the spontaneous while maintaining a firm sense of structure--is impressive, and to this reviewer reminiscent of Willa Cather. Like Cather too, Kokonis is canny in discovering and shaping symbols that seem to emerge naturally from skillfully presented realistic details.
Take Arcadia's Brown River, for example. Flowing-oozing, more accurately-not far outside the tiny village of Angelo's birthplace and home, this stream has over generations become a cesspool, poisoned by the human and animal waste generated by the peasants' own simple but severely bounded lives. On windless, hot nights its stench is unbearable, and on each of the seven- kilometer trips Angelo makes between his home and Polis, where he lives in a barn during his high school years, he has to walk close to its banks. One troubled night he dreams that he falls into its filthy water, and however desperately he tries to claw his way out, keeps falling back down its slimy banks. Simply to observe what is in fact the case, that this dream narrative epitomizes the pattern of Angelo's entire life, the increasingly costly and irrational obstacles set before him every time he takes a single step toward independence for himself and his family, is to reduce to a bare equivalence what in Kokonis’s richly interconnected text is a subtle and nuanced realization.
Unlike many novelists who concentrate on the inner landscape of consciousness, Nicholas Kokonis, a professional psychologist himself, shows an astute sense of politics and the range of other social networks that shape much that we think of as the self and its aspirations. And unlike many who do share this awareness, Kokonis realizes that human beings are never simply the products of society and its forces. Thus Arcadia, My Arcadia brings, especially to American readers, a wonderfully rich sense of family and community. To those for whom religion is essentially privatistic, it offers immersion in a community still regulated both by the ancient rhythms of seasonal myths and of liturgical Christian worship.
American readers, too, particularly since 9/11, will benefit from Kokonis’s well-informed, remarkably non-ideological depiction of the ways the Eisenhower administration's global policies of the early 1950s profoundly affect, indeed almost ruin, Angelo's heroic bid for the very benefits democracy offers. By programmatically tying economic support to the loudness and stridency of given nations' opposition to Communism, American policy inadvertently empowered hundreds of local demagogues eager to pocket aid meant for humanitarian relief, to use anti-communist shibboleths to punish those they disliked, and to extort mercilessly from those who required their endlessly fabricated certifications and permissions. No direct depiction of McCarthyism's excesses in the United States is more telling than are the scenes in Arcadia in which Angelo himself, or one of his most inspiring teachers, is threatened or smeared by alleged sympathy or association with Communism. Since the immediate to long range effectiveness of American policies in the post-Cold War era, dominated by rapidly mutating forms of terrorism and changing conceptions of nation-states themselves, will depend to no small measure on our ability to see the impact of those policies at ground level and in cultures quite distinct from our own, novels like this one can be invaluable in educating our moral and civic imaginations.
Some readers will fault Arcadia, My Arcadia for its slow pace and the quietness of its action. This reviewer would be the first to agree that Nicholas Kokonis’s gifts lie more in language, characterization, description, and richness of theme than in narrative per se. Having said this, though, I would emphasize that the novel has continued to percolate in my mind since my first acquaintance with it. It easily enters part of an ongoing dialogue with classic initiation works such as Catcher in the Rye; and, given Angelo's early, deliberate commitment to the cultivation of arête, or moral excellence, his dogged sense of self-discipline, and his dedication to the written word as a primary agent of freedom and usefulness, it serves as a stimulating companion text to books like Benjamin Franklin's Autobiography and Richard Wright's powerful self-portrait, Black Boy. Ultimately, Kokonis’s worth as a writer lies in the way he sees. Poet and translator Richard Wilbur, in a brief lyric simply called "Objects," praises the Dutch painter Pieter de Hooch for his "devout intransitive eye." That phrase comes close to defining the quality of Kokonis’s vision. "Intransitive" does not mean either disinterested or passive. It is a moral, but not primarily judgmental, way of seeing. It eschews pity but does empathize, and doing so, it humanizes both good and all but the most frightening forms of evil. Ultimately, it may not be the vision without which we perish, but its lack guarantees our own, and countless others', impoverishment.”—William Graddy, Ph.D.