Books: The Seas of Love

THE MERMAID MADONNA (310 pp.)—Stratis Myrivilis—Crowell($5).

The scene is a sun-drenched Aegean island. The central character is a blonde, green-eyed girl, found as a baby by a drink-fuddled Greek fisherman and grown into a woman who has the local boys dreaming. By most fictional standards, this should be the cutoff point, the end of any sensible man’s interest in a novel called The Mermaid Madonna. No one should make that mistake. Author Stratis Myrivilis is probably the finest of living Greek writers. The Mermaid Madonna is the first of his books to come to the U.S., and even with its liberal dash of corn it introduces a writer who makes the true novelist’s commitment, to life itself.

What is there to say about Smaragthi? Beautiful, of course, and so rounded in the right places that even her foster father tries to violate her when, drunk again, he comes home to find her naked and asleep. But even though Smaragthi’s face and figure dominate the small fishing village of Skala, she has to share a sensuousness that in the end is bigger and sweeter than she. For Novelist Myrivilis is not just in love with his heroine—he is in love with Greece.

The villagers are not only poor, they are refugees from Turkish Anatolia. They are superstitious, backbiting and Christian to the point of worshiping a mermaid Madonna whom a passing fisherman has painted on a wall of the local church. Their life comes from the sea, and it is the sea that dominates the novel. The heroine worships it, the hero dies in it, and the plain villagers are bounded by it as their neighbors are bounded by olive groves. The young men may lust for Smaragthi. but they lust even more for the sea and the role of boat’s captain.

Author Myrivilis allows for more sentimentality than most; yet it does not cloy. The reason is quite simple: that is how things are. Smaragthi remains consistent to the end, unmarried, herself a sort of mermaid Madonna who rolls naked in the sea like a porpoise but shrinks with revulsion from a man’s touch. The fishermen soak up the local booze, beat their wives, and listen with awe to the tavernkeeper’s yarns about the wonders of America, where he made his pile. An ancient crone tells wondrous fairy tales. A pathetic schoolmaster dreams of the great day when Greece will rise and take Anatolia from the Turks. But above all, there is a palpable sense of humanity that comes from a people for whom life is harsh but living sweet.