Dendrites by Kallia Papdaki

Greek Fiction

Original title – Δενδρίτες

Translator – Karen Emmerich

Source – review copy

I don’t read many books based in the US just because I didn’t read my US writers many years ago. I did. Growing up, I was a fan of Bellow, Mailer, Roth, etc and the beats. But in recent years, I have maybe read one or two books a year from the US, and occasionally, I like this book set in the US by writers. Outside the US, or like Kallia Papadaki, who grew up in Thessaloniki in Greece, then studied in the US at Bard, and Brandeis, the former in New York, isn’t that far from the setting of this book in Camden, New Jersey. The book follows the events in the 1980S, but it also follows the family history and how the town fell apart around the families. Kallia has since returned to Greece to study film studies, and this was shortlisted for the EU Prize for literature.

Her parents had met at the Campbell Soup factory, where a twenty-four-year-old Susan stacked cans on a conveyer belt eight hours a day, six days a week, and where, at twenty-eight, Basil was a manager, responsible for nearly a thousand people per shift, plus hundreds of thousands of identical cans of concentrated tomato soup. Susan had once been a student at Ohio State University, but a year before she was set to earn her degree in political science with a focus on political economy, she fell in love with the hippie son of an industrialist, dropped out, and followed him accrossthe country, all the way to Haight-Ashbury, San Fran-cisco. Their romance lasted a year and a half-one summer at a commune and two mild winters on the streets panhandling love from passersby and handing out flowers in return, until Leto and Woodstock came between them, and the harsh winters of the Northeast, which were nothing to laugh at, and so after the rain and mud of the festival they limped their separate

Susan past with the hippie and then meeting Basil

The book follows the Campanis Family from the arrival of Antoinis in a time when this part of NEW JERSEY WAS Thriving, his children find work around the Campbell soup factory, and when a daughter falls for the hippie son of the factory owner in the sixties. we see how their children in the 80s are seeing the first cracks in the town of Camden as the city is starting to change. This is a mix of all the family’s stories from the theAntoinnis arriving in the winter and making his way to the kids making their way to what happens when the American turns sour in the generation that follows. We see Minne in the eighties as an orphan. She is taken in by the hippie daughter Susan of the Campanis family, who married Bsil, her second husband, a manager at the factory. Their daughter Leto is Minie’s mate, but taking her in opens family scars, which adds to the fact that a missing child, the world they live in, and the factories close the house get boarded up. As it says at the start of the book, a town now has the highest crime rate in New Jersey.

Susan waits in the car to make sure the girl can get inside as Minnie knocks on the front door for Louisa to open, in her haste that morning she forgot her keys on the kitchen counter, but the door doesn’t open and Minnie keeps knocking with no response, so Susan locks the car, walks over to the girl and asks if there’s a back door or a window that might be open, and Minnie leads her around the side of the house, where the kitchen window looks sidelong onto the street, and Susan cups her hands and rests them against the glass to banish the glare as Minnie stands on tiptoe to peek in, only she’s too short by a good ten inches and Susan feels the chilly November wind slipping under her blouse, a wind that’s picking up, blowing down from Montreal and the distant Arctic beyond, a wind that freezes everything except time

Susan in the 80s when they take in the Orphan in to their family home

I liked this family saga, but it does jump from time to time as we build the layers of three generations of the family and how the world around them fell apart in the 80s. This is a book that the writer said she thought of after seeing a man in his nineties in New Jersey like Antoinis, who came to the US and never came back to Greece as she saw him at a Greek dinner in New Jersey. She then spent a year researching Greek Americans’ history and then two years writing it. But it is a book that could be anyone it could be an Irish American in a bar not having gone back, etc. it is also about the loss of the American dream, how those factory jobs vanished and when they did the towns built around these industries fall apart and this in the later years in this book is the aftermath of the broken American dream. This is the sort of place Springsteen used to sing about those hard streets of tough men and hard-working women and what happened when the American dream fell apart. I like how she drifts through time and stuck the time in music, places, and memories of those years. it is a book that is dark in places as it is about a place falling apart and about how those dreams that started so well fell apart, and we end up with a ninety-year-old man unable to afford the ticket home to Greece. Do you have a favourite tale in the US by a non-US writer?

Winstons score – B, solid account of the American dream falling apart over three generations.