Archipelago

A translator ruminates on the nature of authorship and identity in Bakopoulos’s atmospheric if underwhelming novel. The unnamed narrator, who’s nearing 50, travels from Greece for an artist’s residency on a Croatian island. On the ferry ride over, she has a “destabilizing” encounter with a man, whom she thinks is staring at her. The unease sticks with her as she settles into life on the island alongside fellow European artists such as her old friend Luka, a writer and journalist who calls her Natalia, which is not her name but rather that of a character in his novel that might be loosely based on her. She decides to go by Natalia and they begin an affair, prompting her to stay for the rest of the summer. The narrator takes daily swims, ambles with Luka down cobblestone alleyways, and has multiple ominous encounters that, like the initial scene on the ferry, don’t go anywhere. There are some incisive observations about similarities between the way tourism blurs national boundaries and how a translator complicates the relationship of an author to a text, but the sum of the narrator’s thoughts doesn’t amount to a story. Hints that she might be blurring fiction with real life are likewise underdeveloped. This one leaves the reader wanting more. (Aug.)