A Review of Petar Andonovski’s Fear of Barbarians (2022, Parthian Books)

In 2009, Daniel Mendelsohn published his translation of the complete works of C.P. Cavafy, the eminent turn-of-the-century Greek poet who was born and lived most of his life in Alexandria, Egypt. Cavafy saw himself as a “poet-historian,” Mendelsohn writes in the volume’s introduction, and his poetry returns “obsessively to a question that is, essentially, a historian’s question: how the passage of time affects our understanding of events.” While this theme can feel elusive in Cavafy’s mature work, much of his early verse, written prior to 1905, grapples quite directly with the correlation between time and our understanding.

Among these early poems is “Waiting for the Barbarians,” in which a voice anxiously questions abnormal activities happening around town—crowds gathering in the square, the Emperor up early and seated on his throne, worthy orators conspicuously absent. In each instance the questioner is told “the barbarians will arrive today” and these steps are being taken to accommodate them. When the streets empty out and everyone returns home in “deep contemplation,” the questioner again wonders why. This time they are told that the barbarians never showed, and rumor has it “there are no barbarians anymore.” The poem concludes with a despondent couplet from the voice that previously held all the answers: “And now what’s to become of us without barbarians./Those people were a solution of a sort.” It remains a piercingly devastating indictment of society more than a century after it was written.

North Macedonian author Petar Andonovski took the title for his third novel, Fear of Barbarians, from Cavafy’s poem, and traces of the poet’s work can be felt throughout this reflective novella about two women, Oksana and Penelope, trying to escape isolation in the  promise of the past. The book won the EU Prize for Literature in 2018 and is now available in an atmospheric English-language translation by Christina Kramer that keeps the women’s desperation and longing plangent on every page.

Oksana is a foreigner; Penelope a local. Both are told the other is a potential threat, but the two women are in fact fighting the same oppressor: a patriarchy that sees women as little more than servants and every bit as inscrutable—and potentially dangerous—as “the barbarians.” Both live in a tiny village on the tiny Greek island of Gavdos, south of Crete. Both seldom go out and their interactions with other villagers are almost solely vicarious, had through the stories told to them by their jailers, who relate the details of their days. Both find solace in recalling episodes from their youth involving unnamed female friends who disappear. And both narrate their own stories, told in alternating chapters, though their control over those stories is minimal and repeatedly thwarted, often with devastating consequences.

Oksana grew up in Donetsk, in eastern Ukraine, then moved to Kyiv for university, where she met Evgenii. (Unfortunately, the novel uses the Russian spelling Kiev.) The two are assigned to work at Chornobyl, and after the meltdown, they return to Kyiv. Several years later they run into Igor, a former coworker whom they believed had died in the reactor explosion. Igor tells them that he was cured of his radiation poisoning in a small village in Crete, and invites them to come with him when he returns south in December, though this time he will instead be going to Gavdos. Oksana, Evgenii, and Igor are Russians, but their nationality is irrelevant to this story. Their arrival on the isolated Greek island is met with trepidation only because they are foreigners and hence “barbarians.” 

Igor tells Oksana and Evgenii not to leave the house until the islanders get used to them, but only Oksana abides by his warning. Evgenii is the sicker of the two, coughing up blood in the evenings, yet he still goes fishing with Igor initially. His condition worsens, however, and Igor’s misgivings are justified when the doctor is hesitant to help an ailing foreigner. When Oksana ventures out to get water from the well, she encounters Penelope, who looks at her not “with fear but with disbelief,” before running off. Soon the isolation will made Oksana as stoic as Penelope, “incapable of feeling fear, or any other emotion.”

Penelope was raised in a convent on Crete and given to Mihalis as a wife when she was 16 years old. The only time Mihalis left his home on Gavdos was when he went to pick up Penelope at the convent and bring her back. He is “a real animal, a real savage,” who won’t even eat with his wife and their daughter, Irini, believing that a “woman’s place is beside the table, not at the table.” Penelope is a reluctant mother, who “never loved Irini as a mother should love her child.”

As Evgenii’s health deteriorates further, Oksana’s actions increase her solitude, and she begins to crave Igor’s stories about the islanders. He is an unreliable storyteller, though it is never clear how much he is lying and whether his lies are malicious or merely spun out of self-preservation. Many of his stories concern Stella, the wife of the lighthouse keeper. Stella is only seen through the eyes of men, Igor and others in the town whose stories Penelope hears second-hand from Mihalis. Stella is almost always referred to as “crazy,” either the “crazy wife” or the “crazy woman.” All readers know for sure is that she spends her days staring at the sea, as if waiting for a boat to come and take her away.

Oksana and Penelope’s reflections on their childhood relationships constitute the only bright spots of their lives. Initially it seems that perhaps Penelope is recalling Oksana and vice versa. For Oksana, however, it is a childhood friend in Donetsk, someone she tried to forget as a means of self-preservation. “Since the day you left, I promised myself I would forget you completely, that seemed easiest, but it was only after I left Donetsk and went to study in Kiev that I stopped remembering you.” Now on Gavdos her memories have returned. She recalls how she and her friend imagined their lives panning out, her friend wanting to be a cartographer, like her father, and Oksana wanting to travel endlessly, telling her friend “that if travel is the search for one’s self, I never want to find myself.” It was the last time, she says, that she laughed “sincerely, wholeheartedly.”

Penelope’s memories concern a girl who came to the convent several years after her own arrival. Despite the warnings of the sisters that the new girl is “an absolute devil,” Penelope grows enamored and maybe even falls in love. The girls plan to run away together, first to Athens then to Spain, where Penelope would be an artist and her inamorata would open a pastry shop. Penelope credits the appearance of Oksana, Evgenii, and Igor with reviving her recollections of her friend, wondering “Would I have thought of you at all, would I have had the courage to stand at this window if they hadn’t come, the barbarians?”

Both Oksana and Penelope yearn to recapture the hope of their younger days, moments that now only exist in amber. The prominence of these vanished voices recalls “The Voices,” another early poem of Cavafy: 

“Imagined voices, and beloved, too,
of those who died, or of those who are
lost unto us like the dead. 

[…] 

And with their sound for a moment there return
sounds from the first poetry of our life—
like music, in the night, far off, that fades away.”

Andonovski’s story shines a spotlight on women like Oksana, Penelope, and Stella for whom the first poetry of their lives remains the only poetry of their lives. But these characters never truly find a voice of their own. Penelope makes an attempt to control her future, but it is driven by futility and ends in failure. Oksana’s life remains completely dependent on Igor’s actions. And Stella, seeing no way out, makes the only decision she feels is available to her. All of which contributes to an overwhelmingly oppressive atmosphere. Other recent titles where male-dominated societies have taken away women’s agency, including standouts like Miriam Toews’s “Women Talking” and Sophie Mackintosh’s “The Water Cure,” allow the women some agency eventually. That doesn’t happen here. Oksana, Penelope, and Stella are trapped, unable to get out. 

Such an outcome is not fanciful, of course, as it plays out every day all across the world. And an empowering or uplifting ending is certainly never a requirement for fiction. But life on Gavdos is terribly bleak. Andonovski’s story and Kramer’s translation are enthralling, but there is no joy here. There is inertia born of routine, there is fatalism smothering faith, and the only whisper of life comes from the fading voices of the past.

Reviewed by by Cory Oldweiler