Archipelago - Bakopoulos, Natalie

Biographie:
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....

Sommaire:
In the wake of a carjacking, Archipelago's unnamed narrator leaves the States for a translation writing residency on the Dalmatian coast. Along the way, she has an unsettling, aggressive encounter with a man on a Greek ferry, which sets off a series of strange events. At the residency, she reunites with Luka, an old friend from Croatia. Luka calls her Natalia, the name of a character he's written who seems to be based on her. The narrator doesn't correct him, instead allowing this ascribed version of herself to unfold. Untethered to her previous life, she extends her stay, and she and Luka strike up a romantic relationship as she continues her translation work. The hazy summer stretches on until, after a sudden shift, she reclaims narrative agency and takes an impulsive road trip back to Greece, encountering new places, faces, realities, and selves as she crosses borders and traverses the terrain. Spare and lyrical, with subversions of The Odyssey and its Ithaca, Archipelago charts a wending journey back to the narrator's family home-not simply back to a self, but beyond it--...