Father Dancing: An Invented Memoir by Nick Papandreou Viking 181pp, £16 in UK
"POLITICS is an enemy to family, an opposing force," writes Nick Papandreou, Greek-American grandson and son of Greek prime ministers. "At some point love, no matter how strong, hides and cowers in the corner while politics, hot, naked and sweating, moves in like a Minotaur."
"Invented memoir" is a classification that tantalises. Where, in this intimately affectionate and nationalistically passionate account of childhood in a political family, do truth and fiction join and possibly overlap? There is no way the outsider can decide. One can only guess. But all the evidence suggests that "Alex", the narrator, really is Nick, the author. The autobiographical framework seems authentically factual; only some characters, incidents and dialogue may be products of poetic licence.
Nick deserves poetic licence: he writs like a poet, able to define patriotic and filial (and grand-filial) love in down-to-earth terms of sensuous specifics. In an introductory Hellenophilic rhapsody he apostrophises the reader: "We would bodysurf on white waves in the day and soak up the moonlight at night. I would dry you a starfish and hang it on your wall so you could smell the salty Aegean in your room, and ask you to breathe in the aroma of osier, broom and ginger root... We would listen to Byzantine hymns from the church of Saint Christopher, inhale frankincense, kiss the hand of an old priest, and suck honey from wax.
All that in the very first paragraph!
Perhaps his senses were especially receptive to the sights, scents, tastes and sounds of his ancestral land because he was exposed to them for the first time as an impressionable eight-year-old, when his father took him and the rest of his family there from his native California. He was also deeply impressed then by the fact that the ordinary people of Greece idolised his Papandreou grand- father and father. Great crowds gathered to listen to the Papandreous' socialist oratory. Their anti-monarchist message got them into trouble but eventually prevailed.
Nick's father, busy with politics, appointed one Manoli to look after the Papandreou children. Alex/Nick was thus influenced by the orthodoxy of Greek religion and superstition, as well as political doctrine. At that time, there were still Greek adults who believed that spitting on the forehead could save someone from the baleful effects of the evil eye. Manoli may have personified the confusion of a country in philosophical transition when he said: "I'd become an atheist if God would let me!"
Nick and his mother - "an impressive brunette born in a working-class suburb of Chicago whose father taught her to work hard, live clean and not complain about the weather" - learned to inhabit two worlds. He recalls that "with equal pleasure I wolfed down my Greek grandmother's baklava and my American grandmother's apple pie". Even as a child, however, he decided that "I wouldn't trade Greece for all the hot-dogs and Mars Bars in the world."
During the Colonel's dictatorship, Nick's father was imprisoned for several months in 1967, then followed his family into exile in North America. Nick (or maybe only Alex?) spent some time in Canada. Nick, certainly, was educated at Yale, Princeton and the University of Vermont. With the reinstatement of democracy in Greece, Papandreou was able to take his family back and he re-entered all-demanding, top-level domestic politics. Nick's grandfather's marriage foundered and he went to live with an actress. Nick's father and mother divorced and he married a young airline stewardess. Politics was, indeed, an enemy to family.
Papandreou died last year.
"My childhood memories of my father are of a man at a distance," Nick writes. "I don't recall the smell of his shaving lotion, the shape of his hands or the way he wore his hat ... I see him surrounded by crowds, lost in their embrace.
But Nick recognised his father's humanity when he saw him dancing alone to the music of the bouzouki. Now, living in Athens, Nick sometimes dances, "prompted by an urge to bring on a certain sadness and melancholy". He concludes: "What I see in front of me is not the men on their knees clapping, not just the bouzouki players' hands fluttering like wings. I see crowds, I hear speeches, I see my father, dancing."