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Natalie Bakopoulos's Archipelago is a striking, haunting novel that offers meditations on the slippery borders of nations, languages, middle age, and the self.
Along the way to a translation writing residency on the Dalmatian coast, Archipelago's unnamed narrator has an unsettling, aggressive encounter with a man on a ferry, which sets off a series of strange events. At the residency, she reunites with Luka, an old friend who seems to have included a version of her in his novel. They strike up a romantic relationship as she continues her translation work.
The hazy summer stretches on until, after a sudden shift, she embarks upon an impulsive road trip back to Greece, crossing borders. Spare and lyrical, with subversions of the Odyssey and its singular Ithaca, Archipelago charts a wending journey back to the narrator's family house―not simply back to a self and home, but beyond it.
"There are some incisive observations about similarities between the way tourism blurs national boundaries and how a translator complicates the relationship of an author to a text, but the sum of the narrator's thoughts doesn't amount to a story. Hints that she might be blurring fiction with real life are likewise underdeveloped. This one leaves the reader wanting more." —Publishers Weekly
"The 'disquiet' promised by the novel's opener turns out to be nothing more than the everyday surprises and irritants of life, albeit in a dazzling setting. For some readers this may be enough. More of a travelogue interspersed with story than the other way around." —Kirkus Reviews
"Archipelago is a gorgeous, haunting novel about translation, narrative, and the slippage between selves: who we are and who others believe us to be. We follow our narrator-traveler on her dreamlike journey, from one achingly beautiful setting to another, from one memory to another, tantalized and unsettled by her every encounter. With this novel Bakopoulos weaves a spell and a mystery and makes something wholly her own." ―Lydia Kiesling, author of Mobility
This information about Archipelago was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Natalie Bakopoulos is the author of Scorpionfish and The Green Shore. Her work has appeared in Ploughshares, Ninth Letter, Kenyon Review, Tin House, VQR, The Iowa Review, The New York Times, Granta, Glimmer Train, Mississippi Review, MQR, O. Henry Prize Stories, and various other publications. She received her MFA from the University of Michigan, has received fellowships from the Camargo and MacDowell foundations and the Sozopol Fiction Seminars, and was a 2015 Fulbright Fellow in Athens, Greece. She's an assistant professor at Wayne State University in Detroit. Her book reviews have regularly appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle, and she's a contributing editor to Fiction Writers Review. She's on the faculty of Writing Workshops in Greece.
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