Scan barcode
leaalien's review against another edition
Slow moving and had to return to the library.
brinnet's review against another edition
3.0
It took me half a year to read what I thought would be a light travel memoir. It's dense, and if you know nothing about Greece or Greek culture, it is even denser. Part of what made this book challenging for me was its inconsistency — some chapters were 40 pages retelling a classic story and others were three pages long about her experiences at a dance club. I was never quite sure what I was sitting down to read.
As a teacher of international students, I always find it fascinating reading about other cultures, and this book is full of that. Patricia Storace has encyclopedic knowledge of Greece, its language, and its history. That is both fascinating and incredibly dull at times, depending on your interests.
This book is not endless raptures about her year in Greece. It feels like a balanced, detached portrayal. Greece sounds beautiful and full of machismo. It appears to be both patriotic and insecure. Highly religious and knows how to throw a party. Storace does an amazing job highlighting the dualities of Greece and showing how an American might experience those dualities.
This book was published in 1996, so I have no idea how modern Greek culture may have changed in the past 20-something years. Has the internet affected the youngest generation and it’s perception of women, or is feminism still a unicorn?
I have mixed feelings about visiting Greece from this book. On the one hand, its cultural emphasis on hospitality is repeated throughout the text, as is its beauty. On the other hand, she also tells of resentment toward foreigners, infrastructure issues, and sexual harassment of women. Hmmm.
Because of the density of the book, I wouldn't recommend it to the casual reader. However, if you really love history or Greece or are curious about either, this book is a fountain of knowledge and is told from a familiar perspective.
As a teacher of international students, I always find it fascinating reading about other cultures, and this book is full of that. Patricia Storace has encyclopedic knowledge of Greece, its language, and its history. That is both fascinating and incredibly dull at times, depending on your interests.
This book is not endless raptures about her year in Greece. It feels like a balanced, detached portrayal. Greece sounds beautiful and full of machismo. It appears to be both patriotic and insecure. Highly religious and knows how to throw a party. Storace does an amazing job highlighting the dualities of Greece and showing how an American might experience those dualities.
This book was published in 1996, so I have no idea how modern Greek culture may have changed in the past 20-something years. Has the internet affected the youngest generation and it’s perception of women, or is feminism still a unicorn?
I have mixed feelings about visiting Greece from this book. On the one hand, its cultural emphasis on hospitality is repeated throughout the text, as is its beauty. On the other hand, she also tells of resentment toward foreigners, infrastructure issues, and sexual harassment of women. Hmmm.
Because of the density of the book, I wouldn't recommend it to the casual reader. However, if you really love history or Greece or are curious about either, this book is a fountain of knowledge and is told from a familiar perspective.
lizlogan's review against another edition
3.0
This book was well written, but a bit longer than it needed to be. The descriptions were spectacular, but at times the book delved much too deeply into history without being as personable as many travel narratives are. As a result the book is quite dry making it difficult to keep reading without stopping. Because of this, it took me much longer than it should have to finish this book even though I enjoyed the language she used to describe what she was seeing.
left_coast_justin's review against another edition
5.0
I'm amused by reviews that splutter, "This isn't like Greece at all! She just doesn't get it!" As if there were some objective 'Greece' that we can all agree upon, and she somehow failed to notice it.
Because, of course, this is not a book about Greece at all. It's a book about Patricia Storace, and how she spent one year of her life, and which happened to occur in Greece. And had Ms. Storace not been an interesting topic for a book, this could have been awful. Luckily, she is a woman of deep passions and great learning. (And as others have noted, she is not afraid to show it.)
When you combine deep passions, great learning, and the introverted personality of a serious writer, you tend to get a degree of fabulation. The set of people she befriends in Athens, and who crop up now and again at different points in the book, are all glittering examples of cultured humanity --actors, playwrites and the like. Her new friend Kyrios, for example, allegedly opines over a plate of olives:
Did he really say this, and is her memory of all those interlocking clauses really that perfect? To insist on the veracity of what she writes is to miss the point, and to rob yourself of the pleasures this story can provide. I did learn quite a bit about modern Greece while reading it, and I have no cause to doubt the extensive and often-violent sexism that she reports on. Despite that, she clearly loves the place, warts and all, and this book filled me with joy in the same way that watching newlyweds or old couples holding hands can do.
It turns out that Patricia Storace is a wonderful topic for a book, and she is the ideal person to tell it.
Because, of course, this is not a book about Greece at all. It's a book about Patricia Storace, and how she spent one year of her life, and which happened to occur in Greece. And had Ms. Storace not been an interesting topic for a book, this could have been awful. Luckily, she is a woman of deep passions and great learning. (And as others have noted, she is not afraid to show it.)
When you combine deep passions, great learning, and the introverted personality of a serious writer, you tend to get a degree of fabulation. The set of people she befriends in Athens, and who crop up now and again at different points in the book, are all glittering examples of cultured humanity --actors, playwrites and the like. Her new friend Kyrios, for example, allegedly opines over a plate of olives:
"Our whole history is a cycle of miracles. It cannot be understood with reason--and I don't say this out of nationalism. Who can explain how the Cyclopean walls of Mycenae were possible, the perfection of the Parthenon, which was built before you had a language, the sublimity of Agia Sofia, so beautiful that it alone converted the savage Russians, the women of Zalongo, who danced off cliffs to their deaths so the Turks could not capture them, or 1940, when we almost with our bare hands defeated Mussolini's soldiers with their beef and their overcoats and their imitation of civilization? Greece will never die, no matter how much people who hate our light would like to snuff us out.".
Did he really say this, and is her memory of all those interlocking clauses really that perfect? To insist on the veracity of what she writes is to miss the point, and to rob yourself of the pleasures this story can provide. I did learn quite a bit about modern Greece while reading it, and I have no cause to doubt the extensive and often-violent sexism that she reports on. Despite that, she clearly loves the place, warts and all, and this book filled me with joy in the same way that watching newlyweds or old couples holding hands can do.
It turns out that Patricia Storace is a wonderful topic for a book, and she is the ideal person to tell it.
jenniferaimee's review
2.0
This book perplexed me. I don't have enough of a background on Greek society to know whether the stories the author told about her time in Greece were typical, and it seems ignorant of me to say she must have embellished or selected only the worst ones to share in this book, but wow. If I were treated by any man the way the author was treated by countless men within, from her telling, her first month in Greece, I would've been out of there so fast. That impression makes me want to say she must have embellished, at least a little. The blatant sexism described at least every 20 pages of this book just seems so excessive. And the fact that the author did get to pick and choose what she wrote about makes me wonder about her motive in writing this. If it was intended as a treatise on how misogynistic Greek culture is, then I wish she had produced an actual study, instead of this, which was advertised as a travel narrative. The style of this was, at times, lovely, and the author included a breadth of history and some folklore/myths which were really enjoyable, but I just couldn't get over how her overall presentation of Greece as a country was just so negative. She didn't seem to love Greece, and she applied specific incidents generally across the people as a whole, and those generalizations drove me crazy. And because I've never been to Greece, I can't definitively say that not everyone is the way she portrayed them, but...they can't be? Because why would she have elected to live there for a year if she disliked the country so much?
I don't know, I just did not appreciate the American perspective in this instance. (Also this was written 19 years ago so I'm hoping some things have changed, if her portrayals of her experiences are accurate.) Overall this just left me with a bad feeling. (But I may have just entirely missed the point. Who knows.)
I don't know, I just did not appreciate the American perspective in this instance. (Also this was written 19 years ago so I'm hoping some things have changed, if her portrayals of her experiences are accurate.) Overall this just left me with a bad feeling. (But I may have just entirely missed the point. Who knows.)
More...