Review:Apartment in Athens

Published just as the conflict it so intimately chronicled came to an end,'Apartment in Athens' was hailed as an important work that was sure to endure as a reminder of the very human nature of war. For good or for ill, the words of critics have no magical powers:they can merely thrust their opinions onto the reading public and hope for the best. Whether a volume sinks under the waves of oblivion or crests to lasting fame is entirely in the hands of the only gauge that matters:readers (and,to one extent or another, publishing houses).

That 'Apartment in Athens' was out-of-print for more than 30 years, republished by the New York Review of Books just a few years ago,is sadly anything but an anomaly. Popular in its own day, it was rather quickly forgotten in the affluent post-war culture of the Fifties. So much for icon status.Fortunately for twenty-first century readers, Glenway Wescott's tale of the desperately insular plight of a single, though tragically far from singular,wartime family is once again readily available.

The wrenching and understated realism of the drama is weighed on a minutely domestic scale that seamlessly nets the wide swathe of violence and upheaval, eloquently capturing the universal experience of war in the daily traumas and uncertainties of one Greek family.The setting of the action is as the title suggests--all but a few short scenes occur in the home of the once-comfortable Helios family.Their lives already dessicated by the death of their revered older son, the German occupation forces hardship after hardship on them.Their privations mingle with those of their neighbors until they are set apart as one of the families forced to provide room and board for a German officer.

For more than a year they house Major Kalter.The practical and psychological ramifications of living with the enemy are revealed in subtle, often mundane ways.The man that they easily come to think of as "their" German is,of course,more complex than his rigid adherence to protocol suggests.The lack of action in the first two-thirds of the novel serves to underscore the sinister tragedy when it finally comes.

For so much of Glenway Wescott's (1901-1987)career he was viewed as a boy wonder on the international literary scene--perhaps unfairly, given his immense and multi-faceted talent.Published in 1945, at the height of his powers, 'Apartment in Athens' gives us a subtle and fleeting glimpse of the richness he was able to develop in his maturation as an artist.