"It seems appropriate I begin this story here, with a haze, a transposition, a dislocation, a movement between the borders of language and voice and home," writes Natalie Bakopoulos in her incandescent novel Archipelago. With lyrical, recursive prose reminiscent of Katie Kitamura, Bakopulous (Scorpionfish) tells the story of a narrator who answers to Natalia, although that's not her name. Natalia is a middle-aged translator of Greek into English who considers translation "a dream logic as sound and sensual as math." The daughter of a Ukrainian mother and a Greek father, she grew up in Detroit and seems to absorb languages. At a residency on a Croatian island off the Dalmatian coast, she begins translating a Greek novel.
Each morning, she swims in the sea; much of Archipelago is fascinated with bodies of water, including rivers, waterfalls, and the vessels that carry people across. During the residency, Natalia runs into an old friend, Luka, who becomes her lover. One day, he leaves, and she finds his apartment is for rent. She takes his car and drives to her grandparents' former home in Greece, which is now hers to live in. Around the barest sketches of plot, Bakopoulos builds a layered, subtle luxuriation in sensation, family, the passage of time, and the vicissitudes of change. Memories and dreams permeate. Dread ebbs and flows, sometimes with the threat of violence or danger that never fully manifests. This beautiful novel echoes with what it means to tell a story, to live inside of one. --Nina Semczuk, writer, editor, and illustrator