Scorpionfish
Natalie Bakopoulos on her novel set in contemporary Greece
In each installment of “The Usonian Interviews,” The Usonian spotlights a storyteller from a different corner of the globe. This week, The Usonian spoke with Natalie Bakopoulos about Scorpionfish (Tin House Books, 2020), a novel set in contemporary Greece that depicts the interplay of two people who are both coming to terms with their own expression of grief. You can find Scorpionfish at Bookshop, Barnes & Noble, & Amazon.
This interview has been edited for clarity and length. The views presented by the interview subject are the opinions of the subject and do not represent the views of the article’s author or this newsletter. Browse the full interview archive here.
THE USONIAN: Your first novel The Green Shore was set during the junta period in Greece, a dictatorship in Athens that lasted from 1967 to 1974. Scorpionfish is set more contemporaneously, during the Greek debt and migration crisis. For you, what are the differences between writing historical fiction and fiction set in the present day?
NATALIE BAKOPOULOS: The Green Shore was my first novel, and when I wrote it I had the boldness of a first-time novelist—I thought I could write about a time and place in which I did not live. And of course we can; fiction is about imagination. But if we enter spaces that are not ours, we have to do it with hesitancy, thought, care, and compassion. I was doing a lot of research; I was asking a lot of questions.
But I was telling a story that was a very traditional narrative, rotating through different points of view—two siblings, a mother, and their uncle, inhabiting four very different perspectives and experiences. This is the work of the fiction writer, after all. Ultimately, I was telling the story of a left-leaning family and how they were affected by the junta. But when I was in Athens interviewing people, I didn’t immediately understand the reluctance people had to talk about the junta, particularly with a Greek American—the American government was tied up with what was going on. I was interested in that time, and fascist movements and how protests can be silenced—things that keep coming up again and again. And I wish I had incorporated more of that experience into the book itself, of what it meant to be an outsider asking people to talk about a painful period.
So, now, I probably wouldn’t tell the story the same way. I would probably think more about my own subjectivity and my stake in the matter.
I loved Aleksandar Hemon’s The World and All That It Holds. It’s a historical novel, but the epilogue places himself in it, or a version of someone like him, and explains why he wrote that story; the novel becomes this interesting blending of nonfiction and fiction. It’s still fictional, but there’s an “I” present that grounds the story. And I wish I had done that, as the daughter of somebody who left Greece right before the junta, but whose family stayed there. To allow my own narration to show a bit. To show the work, the strings.
When I started writing Scorpionfish, it was also of course fiction, but I really wanted it to be more of a first-person, inhabited narrative set in the time that I was living in Athens. But, David Bezmozgis has this great line about this—when you’re writing fiction set in a contemporary moment, the ground keeps shifting beneath your feet.
At some point, you have to stop moving the narrative with what’s going on and ground it in a certain place and time. That happened with Scorpionfish. I wasn’t thinking so much about what year the novel was set in—I was thinking about two people living in Athens in a certain time and space, whose lives were in limbo, and how they’d be telling each other those stories. It was less about history and research, but more about two lives intersecting based on the people that they know.
TU: Scorpionfish is structurally split between chapters depicting the two romantic leads—from Mira’s perspective and the perspective of “The Captain.” Why were you drawn to this narrative structure?
NB: How can you have two first-person narrators in a novel? As I started thinking about the actual structure of the book, the way I justified it to myself was in the way that they were both telling their stories—both to a reader, but also to one another on their balconies, where they couldn’t see each other.
If you’ve ever spent time on Greek balconies, you know you hear everything—you hear who’s upstairs and downstairs and across the way. Alarm clocks going off and the sound of people eating dinner. So I imagined, as Mira and the Captain were telling those stories, that their stories were overheard by the collective neighborhood, in this space that is both private and public.
Additionally, the book came out during the pandemic, when balconies became a safe place for people to be both in their private homes, but in public too. André Aciman wrote of the Italians who’d go out onto their balconies and clap for the health workers—they’re not clapping, he said, they’re wailing.
So I started thinking about the idea of mourning, and public and collective mourning. Mira has lost her parents, so she’s grieving. She’s also lost this on-again, off-again boyfriend that she loved for many years. The Captain has lost his marriage, he’s lost his way of life, he’s not working. They’re both experiencing grief, which is private, and as they talk to one another, they’re mourning, which is more public. I thought about the ancient Greek and also modern idea of call-and-response lament. There are echoes of that.
TU: Both Mira and the Captain have such rich backstories, from Mira’s split identity as a Greek American to the trauma of her mother’s alcoholism, to the Captain’s failing marriage and his strained relationship with his “lion-in-winter” father. How do you discover your characters?
NB: The characters are all made-up, but there are of course elements of people I know in the characters, but not in the ways you might think. Sometimes a friend might say something, and I’ll say, that’s a lovely line, can I put it in this character that has nothing to do with you? Or I’ll overhear something that inspires something else. But I discover them on the page, word by word, line by line. I am often most like the characters who resemble me the least.
My father died during the pandemic. At the time that I was writing, he was already experiencing cognitive impairment. The Captain’s father is also experiencing his own cognitive decline. I was also thinking about collective memories and generational memories, and what is communicated and passed down. And what is not. And also whose stories we have access to, and how, and why. Even though the character of Nefeli doesn’t get her own voice—I wanted her to be a little more private, less accessible, to keep some of her own story to herself, off the page, because she’s the focal point and moral center of the book, the one who connects and challenges a lot of the other characters. She’s also a character in my first novel, The Green Shore, a minor character in one of the prison camps.
One of the reasons I write fiction is to explore this simple question: What goes on between people?
TU: One aspect that Scorpionfish forefronts is the intergenerational, interconnected communities experienced by Mira and the Captain. Both have families from the same island, yet they were not previously aware of each other. Mira is friends with her ex’s father, “the Novelist”; the Captain is simultaneously an acquaintance with Mira’s ex. Pretty much everyone is connected to the enigmatic artist Nefeli. And we also see a glimpse of a younger generation, and that of Greece’s modern nuances—through the young migrant character of Rami.
This is becoming a long question, but what I’m trying to get at is seeing intergenerational and communal dynamics play out in this way almost feels kind of rare in modern fiction, since at least in America, things feel so fragmented. In writing screenplays, creative executives are always saying to avoid plots that feel 'coincidental'—one character accidentally bumping into each other is a sign of weak writing. And yet, in a place like Athens or the Greek village where there are these connections, these coincidences are eminently plausible.
So my actual question is—how do you see Greek communities and how do you try to create these dynamics in your writing?
NB: In terms of craft, if you’re using a coincidence to make the plot go forward, then it’s probably lazy. But for me, the way these characters are all related is built into the framework of the story. It is the story. Besides, so many things in my life feel like coincidences, and when I was writing Scorpionfish I experienced coincidence after coincidence, so many that they feel inextricable now from the novel itself. Paul Auster had a great essay called “Why Write?” It’s a series of five vignettes that are all about coincidences. He never actually talks about “why he writes” in the essay. He just tells these five different stories of these surprising coincidences that seem too strange and, well, coincidental to actually put in a story. But to him, that was why he wrote. I do think I feel the same.
I always think about confluences—the way stories don’t just have one beginning, but many. Where do we begin the story? Where do we end?
I don’t know if I can make big assumptions about Greek culture and society. But here’s one thing: again and again I’d hear the idea that the Greek family is “important.” And of course it is. That’s good! But family in any culture can also be oppressive. I wanted to avoid writing about family too nostalgically and sentimentally, and to explore grief in a complex way. Mira feels intense grief for the sudden loss of her parents, but she also feels grief for things she felt she never had, or maybe a relationship with her parents that would never be what she would have wished for herself. I wanted to explore her as a forty-year-old intellectual woman moving through that space alone, untethered—but also deeply connected to the family she creates for herself.
TU: In a way, Athens is a character in this novel and you render it so well. What makes Athens a special city for you? What aspects did you want to highlight that maybe the casual tourist or non-Athenian might not be aware of?
NB: There’s the system of antiparochè, which was, to put it simply the way I understand it, where builders would buy the land from a property owner and say, “Okay, this is your land, I’ll build the polykatoikia (multi-unit apartment buildings), and you get five apartments to live in or rent.” So the sense that people would be connected by their apartments is more integral to the actual space itself.
Another aspect is the way land is passed down in Greece. In the States, we buy land, we sell it, we make a profit, we use it as an investment. In Greece, my cousin is living in the house that my dad grew up in. Property is looked at differently here and it’s not quite the same kind of capitalist system. In Athens, people inherit their grandmother’s house or the house in the village or twenty cousins own the same place and this can be a wonderful thing, but also a burden. I’m interested in all these sorts of inheritances, and the layers of history and connection within a house, a building, a neighborhood.
Athens is a vibrant modern city that often gets overlooked, with a focus only on the ancient/classical, a city viewed through the lens of the far and distant past. I’m not against studying the Classics, and I do think a new generation of Classics scholars are doing really interesting work to rethink the role of the field—but so often when you see an article in the New York Times, say, about Athens, it’s usually someone writing about going to Athens and reading Plato with their teenage kid, say, or thinking about ancient history and myth. That’s wonderful, but there is a whole other history of literature and culture that is modern, a huge metropolis of lives and people.
As for Athens, it’s where my imagination wants to live. So when I write fiction, all I want to do, and I say this self-mockingly, is have people sitting around eating and drinking and talking to one another, just being in each other’s company and moving through life’s challenges and joys. It’s very hard for me to incorporate plot because so much of what I want to capture in my work are the ins and outs of daily life. That to me is also story.
TU: What do you hope your readers find in Scorpionfish?
NB: I love that question. It’s almost impossible to answer. Once I write the book, it’s released out there. Zadie Smith said the best time to edit a novel is when you’re onstage at a literary festival about to read from it—when you want to change everything.
I write fiction to be moved and come away with something I didn’t feel before, or to immerse myself in multiple consciousnesses. Ultimately, that’s what I want my readers to get—whether they’re reading the book to read about Athens, or to read about Greece, or simply to read a novel—I want them to be moved.
Natalie Bakopoulos is the author of two novels: The Green Shore (Simon & Schuster, 2012) and Scorpionfish (Tin House, 2020). Her work has appeared in Tin House, VQR, The Iowa Review, The New York Times, Granta, Ploughshares, Kenyon Review, O. Henry Prize Stories, and various other publications. She was a Fulbright Scholar in 2015 in Athens and has taught at the University of Michigan, The MFA Program at Warren Wilson College, College Year in Athens, Semester at Sea, and Writing Workshops in Greece. She is an associate professor at Wayne State University in Detroit.