Dr John Vasilakakos is a prolific and acclaimed writer and literary translator, with 25 original and 5 translated books to his credit. His work has been recognized by both the Australian Government (with numerous literary grants) and also by the Greek Government for his contribution to literature and, generally, to Greek letters in Greece, Australia and the Greek diaspora.
His new book With Borges in Eurotas consists of 13 original, ingenious and gripping short stories, some of which have already been published in various journals in Greece and have been read by thousands of readers.
These 13 stories, which are rendered in a witty and inventive way, make up an unbreakable whole, fragments of which are connected with each other, as parts of one and only “thread”, expressed both as myths and, at the same time, as actual events.
However, a fundamental element which characterizes this short story collection, as well as other works by John Vasilakakos, is that of “intertextuality”. Vasilakakos conducts a discourse here with numerous Greek and non-Greek writers, such as: Jorge Luis Borges, Albert Camus, Stratis Myrivilis, Patrick White, George Seferis, Theodore Kallifatidis, Nikos Kahtitsis, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Milan Kundera, Alexandros Papadiamantis, Henry Miller, Italo Calvino, Antonis Samarakis, Virginia Woolf, Dionysios Solomos, Amoza Oz, Elias Petropoulos, Howard Philip Lovecraft, Thanasis Valtinos, Sotiris Demitriou, Andreas Embirikos, Yiorgos Ioannou, Dionysis Charitopoulos, Menis Koumandareas, Georgios Vizyinos, Kostas Katsoularis, Marcel Proust, Gustave Flaubert and, also, the legendary film director Akira Kurosawa and the famous Indian guru Osho.
What exactly is “intertextuality” and why are so many writers included by Vasilakakos? “Intertextuality” is a term that is related to the theory of the text, and this word is derived from the Latin “intertexto”, which means “weave”.
Having already mentioned “thread”, we are indeed dealing, with a “weaving”. The term “intertextuality” was first used in 1960s by Julia Kristeva, a philosopher, literary critic, semiotician and psychoanalyst. Kristeva argues that every semiotic system, whether it is about the way we set the table or create a poem, is composed on the basis of previous semiotic systems that were developed and transformed.
A literary work is not just what a writer creates, but the result of its relationship with other texts with the same language structure. Kristeva argues that every text is a mosaic made up of annotations, which assimilates and transforms another text. That is exactly what John Vasilakakos does in his new book. Thus, by introducing “intertextuality”, the text ceases to be seen as a self-existent closed entity, and is not hermetically closed. Conversely, the various texts constitute in themselves a palimpsest, which is constantly renewed with every word, and interacts with every added text. Something that is tellingly reflected in John Vasilakakos’ short stories and his work of fiction in general.
What emerges here, is that there is a change in the reader’s role too. Because the reader is called upon to detect the “discourse” of the text he reads, with other texts. This “discourse” is realized mainly at a subconscious level, and its conception and interpretation are related to the story, experiences and views of every reader. Consequently, every text is a “hand-woven” of older and more recent references. Something which is so obvious in John Vasilakakos’ new book.
All the short stories which compose this original and, in my opinion, revolutionary book by John Vasilakakos – in relation to its style and overall plot – is a vast fictional universe with a strong and always vivid sense of reality. And that is because, through all these artifices and literary devices, the writer manages to render snapshots both of his own life, as well as numerous other aspects of the life of the Greek Community in the past, as well as more recent years. It is not at all by accident, then, that leading Greek and foreign literary critics, academics and writers too, have written and spoken very highly of John Vasilakakos’ work in the last 50 years, as well as his incessant presence and contribution to the Greek letters.