The narrator understands her own role as a translator to be one where language itself is fluid but can risk becoming an act of imposition ... A novel of turnings ... A woman on the verge of a horizon she can’t see, and happier for it.
Memory and premonition play a large role in the protagonist’s reality ... Its depth invites rereading, with a sense that each visitation will unearth another treasure.
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.
Stands as both a novel and a meditation on the art and craft of writing: study and example of story and storytelling, investigation and illustration of the desire and the artistry of revelation and understanding. Bakopoulos makes the filigree patches glow. This eloquent work lingers in the reader’s mind.
Bakopoulos urges us to search for...complicated truths ... There is no singular epiphanic moment, but rather a slow and steady unraveling as the narrator realizes her need to return to Greece. She experiences brief moments of illusion, the fleeting images of menacing men in the periphery, at points thinking she sees her younger self walking down the street. These feelings come as a kind of haunting and remembering of past selves.
Told in short, lyric chapters, Natalie Bakopoulos’ Archipelago is a moving, meditative novel about language, identity and a search for self-understanding ... The plot feels secondary to the voice and the speaker’s reflective journey, which are the most compelling components of the novel.
The narrator’s invitingly confiding tone, lovely descriptions of her surroundings, and thoughtful reflections on translation, swimming, aging, borders, and male menace can do only so much to offset the narrative’s lack of story ... More of a travelogue interspersed with story than the other way around.
