Alessandro Barbero The Athenian Women Trans. Antony Shugaar. New York. Europa Editions. 2018. 253 pages. In his novel Athenian Women, newly translated from the Italian, Alessandro Barbero attempts to give us a view of daily life in ancient Athens during the tumultuous year of 411 BC. Thrasyllus and Polemon, two old veterans of the Peloponnesian Wars, are neighbors trying to squeeze out a bare subsistence by farming their land in the Athenian countryside. Both men are widowers and both have a single daughter, old enough to marry, and feel pressure to find a suitor wealthy enough to allow their daughters to live in better comfort. Eubulus, in contrast to Thrasyllus and Polemon, is a resident of the Athenian countryside who can afford a lavish lifestyle that involves drinking parties and orgies. The licentious behavior of this rich man is overdone in the book as his sexual exploits with prostitutes and his slaves is described in detail. It is unclear whether this exaggeration is done for comic effect or to enhance the economic contrast with his much poorer, more modest neighbors. But whatever the reason, it was unnecessary to the plot. One day while Thrasyllus and Polemon are at the Theater of Dionysus watching a production of Aristophanes’s Lysistrata, Eubulus’s son, Cimon, invites Charis and Glycera, the neighbors’ daughters, over to his house to buy some figs. Cimon is portrayed as a crass, spoiled, and abusive young man who is always used to getting what he wants. Despite his stated intentions , what Cimon really wants is to exploit them sexually and humiliate them. Barbero alternates his chapters between descriptions of the Lysistrata that is being staged in Athens and descriptions of the horrible abuse that Charis and Glycera suffer at the hands of Cimon and his friends. The scenes of beatings and fear that the women suffer are extremely difficult to read, and they highlight the abuse that women have had to endure for centuries . The book is described as a “romantic comedy,” but scenes of violence and degradation against women, even though they end up highlighting Cimon’s impotence, do not make the tone of this book feel either romantic or comic. Melissa Beck Woodstock Academy, Connecticut Sergio Chejfec Baroni: A Journey Trans. Margaret Carson. Mumbai. Almost Island. 2017. 155 pages. Works of fiction are sometimes excerpted in literary magazines ahead of their publication . Baroni: A Journey, Sergio Chejfec’s eighth book and his fourth to be translated into English, debuted at the third KochiMuziris Biennale in 2016. Portions of it were pasted on the walls of Kochi, in the southern Indian state of Kerala, to form the artwork Dissemination of a Novel. Originally published in 2007 in Buenos Aires (Chejfec’s hometown), Baroni is Almost Island’s first incursion in non-Indian territory and a remarkable choice of both author and book. The Baroni of the title is Rafaela Baroni, a Venezuelan folk artist born in 1935 and living (as of March 2018) in her anagrammatically named house museum, “El Paraíso de Aleafar,” some 370 miles southwest of Caracas. Like many folk artists, Baroni is a complex and many-sided cultural mediator whose work blurs the boundaries between creative and healing powers. Known for her wooden sculptures of local saints and virgins, brightly colored and fantastically adorned, she is also an original performance artist. Chejfec tells us how occasionally “Baroni performs her own funeral: she dresses in the appropriate attire, a blue dress, which she put together for that purpose, and she lies down in the coffin, homemade as well, where she remains motionless for a long time.” At the heart of this enactment is what Chejfec calls a “double gaze,” enabling the artist to see “herself through the eyes of those who have stayed alive, and [to offer] to the living the lesson of seeing her dead.” By the same double perspective, the funeral performance is Baroni’s way to look simultaneously backward, to her own experiences of death as a result of cataleptic attacks, and forward, to the real event that, although irreversible, she will have rehearsed too many times to go wrong. Chejfec has a unique and compelling way of exploring the inner...
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Dec 27, 2020
Yu Mokhirieva 
