Natalie Bakopoulos's Archipelago is a striking, haunting novel that offers meditations on the slippery borders of nations, languages, middle age, and the self.
Along the way to a translation writing residency on the Dalmatian coast, Archipelago's unnamed narrator has an unsettling, aggressive encounter with a man on a ferry, which sets off a series of strange events. At the residency, she reunites with Luka, an old friend who seems to have included a version of her in his novel. They strike up a romantic relationship as she continues her translation work.
The hazy summer stretches on until, after a sudden shift, she embarks upon an impulsive road trip back to Greece, crossing borders. Spare and lyrical, with subversions of the Odyssey and its singular Ithaca, Archipelago charts a wending journey back to the narrator's family house-not simply back to a self and home, but beyond it.
A novel of turnings; its narrator knows how to pause and gaze at the horizon, without the need for naming what lies beyond her sight, this moment. ….Bakopoulos's narrator [is] a woman on the verge of a horizon she can't see, and happier for it-Chicago Review of Books
Lyric…. moving, meditative novel about language, identity and a search for self-understanding…. moves in waves of beautiful imagery and well-crafted sentences, and beckons the reader to linger.-Book Page
Beautiful novels are common, but elegant novels are rare, and Archipelago is elegant in its honesty, its quiet wisdom, and its undaunted reckoning with the limitations of the stories we tell ourselves.... a singular, meditative, and absorbing read. -Tupelo Quarterly
A haunting debut with echoes of The Odyssey, Archipelago strikes a beautiful balance between meditation and mystery. -LitHub, Most Anticipated Book of the Year
[An] invitingly confiding tone, lovely descriptions of her surroundings, and thoughtful reflections on translation, swimming, aging, borders, and male menace.-Kirkus Reviews
Archipelago is a gorgeous, haunting novel about translation, narrative, and the slippage between selves: who we are and who others believe us to be. We follow our narrator-traveler on her dreamlike journey, from one achingly beautiful setting to another, from one memory to another, tantalized and unsettled by her every encounter. With this novel Bakopoulos weaves a spell and a mystery and makes something wholly her own. -Lydia Kiesling, author of Mobility Natalie Bakopoulos is the author of Scorpionfish and The Green Shore. Her work has appeared in Ploughshares, Ninth Letter, Kenyon Review, Tin House, VQR, The Iowa Review, The New York Times, Granta, Glimmer Train, Mississippi Review, MQR, O. Henry Prize Stories, and various other publications. She received her MFA from the University of Michigan, has received fellowships from the Camargo and MacDowell foundations and the Sozopol Fiction Seminars, and was a 2015 Fulbright Fellow in Athens, Greece. She's an assistant professor at Wayne State University in Detroit. Her book reviews have regularly appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle, and she's a contributing editor to Fiction Writers Review. She's on the faculty of Writing Workshops in Greece.
