UNDERNEATH THE BUNKER

Every literary journal receives its fair share of vitriolic post, and Underneath the Bunker is no exception. Three weeks ago, our notionally esteemed editor passed onto me a message from one Robert Synder, a statistician from Southampton who reads contemporary European literature in his spare time. Synder, unfortunately, is one of the regrettable species of human unable to separate their work from their pleasure, the result of which is that his correspondence is littered with statistics. More alarmingly, he actually believes in the validity of these statistics: he even dares to think that they might prove something. God bless us all.

So what do they prove? Well – in Synder’s words – they ‘undermine the redundancy of the greatest novels list, by revealing conscious ignorance of around ninety two percent of the field. My statistics prove that sixty-four percent of European novels are about war, twenty-eight percent are about sex and the remaining eight percent are about any other subject. As your list appears to consist merely of novels that fall in this final eight percent, I can only conclude that it is a bucket of bullock’s mullock’.

At the risk of wasting yet more words of this review castigating Mr Synder, it is well worth retracing the uncertain steps of his wonky logic. Why is it that statisticians are so consistently out of touch with reality? Synder seems to think that attributes of a chosen selection of objects should be compatible with those that are available. The poor man is a dithering possum: an irresolute ape. He may be right in suggesting this journal has ‘consciously ignored’ at least ninety-two percent of the field – but he fails to understand that there may a very good reason why this is the case.

It was Carlos Magnificas, was it not, who in 1978 wrote that ‘sex and war are the only subjects that really concern the modern European writer’? And yet since then our greatest writers have learnt to avoid these dreary passionless subjects and explored other, more stimulating territories. So what if the majority of European writers are still fabricating flagrant erotic dramas set in war-torn countries? Their result of their redundant endeavour is nought but a flaming mountain of visceral waste. It asks to be ignored, from the first word to the last. It is unadulterated tripe, noumenal extravagance: immodestly moronic excrement. A contemporary writer who takes as his central subject the themes of sex and war is but a deluded dullard – with only one exception. But then, Alexis Pathenikolides’ The Twisted Olive Tree isn’t just about sex and war. It’s also about olives.

Six hundred pages of brutal combat, clammy copulation and brine-soaked fruit – of such things is this novel composed. The first page sets the tone, and from then on the sexily spiked olive-shaped ball keeps on rolling. It is a memorable, if not doom-ridden scene, presented in abrasively ekphrastic prose. If Pathenikolides paints pictures with words, then he paints like Hieronymus Bosch or Ludwig van Meidheim, for his is a fiery and fanatical vision – and not one for the faint-hearted.

We are in Greece, late March, following the hushed conversation of a group of teenagers lying on a hill outside their village, overlooking an ancient, twisted olive tree. They are playing what is known to many of us as the ‘cloud game’. This antique pastime (thought by many to have been invented by Pythagoras’ uncle Praxinimbus) involves nothing more than an ability to detect clouds in the sky and, with a little imagination, to compare their shape to that of an additional object. Thus the immortal last words of the Danish poet and philosopher Ingemar Hölleston: ‘God above! A cloud in the shape of a pomegranate!’ spoken before choking on his own vomit (revealing a conspicuous drawback to a game that involves lying flat on one’s back). A perceptive gamester will have realised, however, that the ‘cloud game’ can be easily transferred to accommodate alternative starting points. As a boy, I used to play a similar sort of game with litter found in the streets, or with clothes flung over the back of a chair. In this novel, meanwhile, the diversion is reassigned to the gnarled olive tree, in whose wildly contorted branches many shapes may be seen. The first person to speak, a boy of fifteen, sees a soldier thrusting a bayonet into a second soldier’s heart. The second sees a sexual episode involving three people and a potted cactus. From here on the visions get increasingly more explicit, as each character reveals a worryingly fecund imagination that is far beyond their years. They seem to be playing, using a harmless game to project their overt fears and fantasies. Yet as Pathenikolides moves his readers beyond the confines of this reasonably amusing diversion, it is soon to be understood that all of these revelations are in fact to be borne out in the course of the novel, in the lives of these very teenagers.

The tree, therefore, is your typical framing device; it hangs around the contents of book like an oppressive gothic border; providing as memorable as closing scene as the aforementioned opening. In fact, the nature of this denouement is hinted from the very beginning, though the detail is easily overlooked. Whilst describing the landscape surrounding the olive tree, the author slips in the words ‘a bird sitting on a grave stone’. Only later are we reminded of this, when it is revealed that the olive tree overlooks the village graveyard. By this time all of the characters have reassumed their position lying on the hills – now covered by three feet of soil.

At this point we must stop to consider the relevance of the olives, the bitter fruit with which the focal tree is seasonally rewarded. If the structure of the tree is redolent of incidents relating to the stuff of war and sex, then – according to Pathenikolides at least – the olives are the stuff of life itself, which grows out of and is constantly affected by these same foundations. From such roots does the central theory of The Twisted Olive Tree grow – a theory which the author might well sum up with almost refreshingly unalloyed statement: life is like an olive. Though the novel never goes so far as saying this straight out, it is implied over and over again, to the extent that one wonders whether Pathenikolides thinks it the best idea ever thought of by man. My personal view is that, while nothing beats a good metaphor, there is a limit to how much one can squeeze from an olive. It contains rich symbolic potential, certainly, but Pathenikolides has a habit of over stuffing it.

Still, if this novel has a single feature, it is excess. There are few subtle gestures: every passage bursts with a muscular zest; words springing from sentences like pouncing tigers, like greyhounds from a trap, like crickets from the corn, hurtling ineffably, arrogantly, mercilessly through the delicate air. Characters move through pages with animalistic purpose: they communicate freely with passionately pulsing bodies, they die amidst fountains of blood, and they rarely give anything – excepting olives – a second thought. This is a novel about the triumph of taste and touch, the victory of matter over mind, the conquest of bodily fluids over intellectual volatility. All of which goes some way to explaining why the Greek press have devoted so much time over the seemingly paradoxical lifestyle of its author.

Writers are not primary media-fodder. In more cases than most they are left well alone by even the most desperate of journalists. Every now and again, however, we thirst to go beyond the printed page and explore the life of its creator. This is one such case – and it is not very difficult to see why. The Twisted Olive Tree is a riot: an orgy of violence and sex, a sensual masterwork, a veritable nuclear bomb of words exploding in its readers’ faces. This novel has personality, and what a personality! Were this novel a person, it would turn up late to a party wearing nothing but blood red face paint, kill every man in the room, impregnate every woman, eat all the nibbles and then dive through a glass window on the way out. In which case, what of the man who wrote the book? Might he not be, if not the greatest personality ever, at least a fascinatingly forceful and flagrantly flamboyant character?

Someone wanted to know and someone found out. And at first someone didn’t like what they found. Gradually, however, someone grew to like it more than they might have supposed. It was incongruous, it was ironic, it was brilliantly funny. It was the best joke ever. Someone shared it with their friends, who shared it with their friends. One of them wrote an article about it. Someone read the article and laughed. For a week or two, barely a minute went by without someone talking to someone else about it.

What it boiled down to was this. Alexis Pathenikolides turned out to be no great personality. The author of The Twisted Olive Tree was found working in a small firm of chartered accountants on the outskirts of Athens. A self-professed virgin and stringent pacifist, the only excessive thing about this middle-aged man turned out to be his ridiculously extended beard (which, on reflection, is not that long, but merely accentuated by the smallness of the face on which it hangs). Researchers worked overtime to dredge up some enigma from the muddy field of the man’s life, but they came up with nothing. The claim that he had fourteen illegitimate children living in South Africa was no more than a hoax. Alexis Pathenikolides was a human of mind-boggling normalness, with all the personality of a beige carpet in a cheap stationary shop. And yet, he had still written the novel – this was for sure. He was not the cover for a piece of sad postmodern trickery. He was the twisted mind behind The Twisted Olive Tree. Regrettably, he wasn’t as good a conversationalist as he was a writer.

Not unfairly, Pathenikolides always wanted his novel to do the talking, but once he’d been uncovered it seemed there was no way back. Barely a week after the article in the newspaper, the poor man was sacked from his accountancy office. Having summoned up the courage to enquire why, he was given a two word response (‘warped mind’). In reply to the reply, he asked how it was that his warped mind affected his ability to do his job as a chartered accountant. On this occasion he received a much lengthier rejoinder, in which his ex-boss both praised him for his copious literary talent and claimed also to adhere to this conception of life as being much like an olive. The man singled out the erotic passages as being his ‘firm yet yielding favourites’ adding that ‘my wife enjoys them also – from a literary point of view, of course’. He went on to say, however, that as much as he loved the novel, he could not deal with the fact that Alexis was the author. ‘To put it simply,’ he wrote, ‘it is impossible for me to work in the same office as you. When I see you I cannot stop thinking of passages from your novel. To be honest, I cannot work under these conditions. Though these passages are exceedingly well written, as I have already stated, it simply will not do to have me thinking of orgies in my working hours. I have spoken to the rest of the office, and they all agree with me. We are happy to spend time with you after work – when our minds are perfectly free to consider your warped fantasies – but otherwise I have no option but to release you from your job’. The letter was signed and then, as a P.S, the man added ‘I considered transferring you elsewhere, but there is a lot of paperwork involved. In any case, I suppose you’re getting a lot of money from the book’.

As it turned out, Pathenikolides was not getting that much money from the book at all. Many people read it, but few bought it, preferring to pass around a small amount of copies amongst themselves, sparing many the embarrassment of walking into a bookshop to buy such a notoriously rude book. Despite this, the author had just enough to live on, and was happy to be able to devote more of his time to writing. He is said to be quietly working away on an epic tale of murder and sexual perversion as we speak.

Of course, how it is that it has taken a naïve and nervous accountant to write the most titillating and viciously shocking book of the last decade remains to be explained. Whilst some critics continue to see it as a freakish, if not downright suspicious happening, I prefer to see it as nothing more than a vindication of the potential of the human imagination. The Twisted Olive Tree is a great work of fiction. Fiction as in fiction – not simply patches of the author’s personal experiences recycled to form a narrative quilt. Pathenikolides has gone so far as to actually make things up. So what if he misfires every now and again (I’m thinking about the lesbian scene in Chapter Eighty-two), he still deserves immense credit for his overall achievement. All the same, I hear you murmuring, what does it matter whether or not he has made it up or not? The fact that the author is a virgin shouldn’t have any bearing on the novel, should it? Is it not purely superfluous information? Well, maybe – but once you know it, you know it. And I prefer not to pretend that I am not affected by these additional facts, as others may do. For this reason, I shall now conclude by relating my individual experience of meeting Alexis Pathenikolides: an experience which invariably affected the way I read his book, though all the words were in the same place as they had been before our encounter.

I met the man only three months ago at a small literary festival in Mantua. The legend of his beard has not been much exaggerated, nor the descriptions of his personality. The former is wild and wide, the latter dull and dead (which leads one to question – is it his beard that writes the books?). Not only does he answer questions shortly and nervously but he frequently gets the erroneous end of the twig – as I shall here explain. In lieu of my extensive work on the subject (see my 1994 study: The Spray-Can Dictionary) I was most keen to talk about the ekphrastic nature of his prose. My creditable intentions were exacerbated, however, by Pathenikolides’ ignorance of the word’s meaning. Almost unbelievably, he supposed that it referred to the young Norwegian firebrand Edmund ‘Blumin’ Ek, struggling therefore to see the point that I was making. Consequently we wasted the remainder of the interview arguing about a position that I had not in fact taken – a frustrating situation to say the least. On the other hand, the unintentional emergence of Edmund Ek into the conversation did allow me to reconsider what it was about Alexis Pathenikolides that was so special. The two do have similarities; their books are equally extreme, full of coarseness, illicitness and brutality. But the Greek master lacks the Norwegian prankster’s self-consciousness, no doubt deriving from the fact that, where Pathenikolides has not lived the outrageous life of his characters, Ek invariably has. The resulting earnest manner with which the former goes about his work is what lends it a superior quality, even if one suspects that the greater mental capacity of Edmund Ek might’ve avoided centring a novel on the idea that a human life is a bit like an olive.

Review by Sebastian Cheraz

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Alexis Pathenikolides Archive