Dinner With Persephone

Rating:
Summary: Beautiful prose, but...
Review: "Dinner with Persephone" chronicles Patricia Storace's experiences and observations during a year she spent living and traveling in Greece. I picked up this book this summer, and brought it with me for a 6-week stay in the Corinthia. In the end, it's a book I have extremely mixed feelings about.

At first I was delighted with the book. Yet as it wore on, I began to grow irritated with Storace's long diatribes. I continually got the sense that she feels she can describe Greeks, Greek culture, and Greek religion definitively in one book -- after living only a year in Athens! Many of her declarations about Greeks and Greek customs don't appear to be grounded in any real research, just her own musings and observations. Towards the end of the book and the end of her stay, she makes a day-trip to Turkey on a ferry, and then a week-long Istanbul trip soon after. Apparently, she feels this brief stay gives her full license to make some incredibly strong statements about the current social state of Turkish women. I couldn't believe her audacity -- this enraging section of the book doesn't seem based on any real encounters with Turkish women. Finally, her long and detailed accounts of how she parries the advances of various Greek and Turkish men grew tiring. Relating these encounters seems to serve little purpose except a lot of ego-stroking.

However, "Dinner with Persephone" still has a lot to recommend itself, mostly in its more poetic, light-hearted parts. Storace has some wonderful pieces of writing in here -- I loved her descriptions of place, and her account of swimming in the Saronic Gulf at the end of summer. I also enjoyed the story "The Godfather," as told to her by one of the many friends she makes along the way. The chapter that is a short biography of Penelope Delta seems slightly out of place, yet still fascinating. Most importantly, she does an admirable job of capturing the dramatic Greek landscape and makes an effort to include elements of Greece's modern history, one of the reasons why I was attracted to the book. These are the true gems of the book, making it a worthwhile read and one to hang onto.

I would recommend "Persephone" but warn the reader to take this in with a critical eye. Storace writes with enough authority to be dangerous -- I met a lot of Americans traveling in Greece who had read "Dinner with Persephone" and still regard her book as gospel! It's as if they're content to just let her opinions speak for Greek culture and not interact or draw any conclusions out of their own experience. I found that the Americans and Europeans I met who spend a great deal of time traveling and/or working in Greece were more critical of this book.

Rating:
Summary: A rich and rewarding book
Review: "Dinner with Persephone" is much more than a travel book -- it's a portrait of a culture, a beautifully written account of the author's year in Greece. Patricia Storace lived in Athens and traveled to towns and islands in Greece throughout her stay there. She describes the people, the customs, the festivals, and day to day life in Greece as she experienced them during her year there. There's a enough description of landscapes, archtitecture and events to make an armchair traveler happy, but the book's real strength is its illumination of the Greek way of life. We come to understand the Greek worldview, and what everyday life in Greece might be like.

I can't help thinking that earlier reviewers on this page might be Turks or Greeks who took offense to some of Patricia Storace's observations -- their reactions to her book are disproportinately harsh, and their comments indicate that they either misunderstood some of what they read, or didn't read the book all the way through.

If every nation had a Patricia Storace to describe its people and culture to the world, we'd understand the reasons behind our differences, and maybe accept them more easily.

Rating:
Summary: Beautiful prose, but...
Review: "Dinner with Persephone" chronicles Patricia Storace's experiences and observations during a year she spent living and traveling in Greece. I picked up this book this summer, and brought it with me for a 6-week stay in the Corinthia. In the end, it's a book I have extremely mixed feelings about.

At first I was delighted with the book. Yet as it wore on, I began to grow irritated with Storace's long diatribes. I continually got the sense that she feels she can describe Greeks, Greek culture, and Greek religion definitively in one book -- after living only a year in Athens! Many of her declarations about Greeks and Greek customs don't appear to be grounded in any real research, just her own musings and observations. Towards the end of the book and the end of her stay, she makes a day-trip to Turkey on a ferry, and then a week-long Istanbul trip soon after. Apparently, she feels this brief stay gives her full license to make some incredibly strong statements about the current social state of Turkish women. I couldn't believe her audacity -- this enraging section of the book doesn't seem based on any real encounters with Turkish women. Finally, her long and detailed accounts of how she parries the advances of various Greek and Turkish men grew tiring. Relating these encounters seems to serve little purpose except a lot of ego-stroking.

However, "Dinner with Persephone" still has a lot to recommend itself, mostly in its more poetic, light-hearted parts. Storace has some wonderful pieces of writing in here -- I loved her descriptions of place, and her account of swimming in the Saronic Gulf at the end of summer. I also enjoyed the story "The Godfather," as told to her by one of the many friends she makes along the way. The chapter that is a short biography of Penelope Delta seems slightly out of place, yet still fascinating. Most importantly, she does an admirable job of capturing the dramatic Greek landscape and makes an effort to include elements of Greece's modern history, one of the reasons why I was attracted to the book. These are the true gems of the book, making it a worthwhile read and one to hang onto.

I would recommend "Persephone" but warn the reader to take this in with a critical eye. Storace writes with enough authority to be dangerous -- I met a lot of Americans traveling in Greece who had read "Dinner with Persephone" and still regard her book as gospel! It's as if they're content to just let her opinions speak for Greek culture and not interact or draw any conclusions out of their own experience. I found that the Americans and Europeans I met who spend a great deal of time traveling and/or working in Greece were more critical of this book.

Rating:
Summary: Not quite
Review: 4 is being a bit generous...I'd give this about 3 1/2 stars.

She's not a bad writer--flowing, but a little pretenious. My main problem with the book is her rather degrading comments towards Greeks and Turks. She seems to make little effort to truly understand either culture, but rather judges it through American eyes.

At the same time, I can definitely understand her prespective, even if I disagree with it. I'm just finishing up a 3-month semester aboard in Athens (I'm orginially from Chicago), and I also visited Turkey twice for a total of 3 weeks. There is much about this culture that is baffling and difficult for Americans. Her descriptions (of Greece) are often accurate, but biased. I find her to be frustratingly inaccurate when it comes Turkey.

Her book is good entertainment reading, but if you really want a slice of Greek or Turkish culture...go to the country and form your own conclusions. Both cultures are complex and not easily reduced by her comments...



Rating:
Summary: An arrogant and unsympathetic book about a foreign culture.
Review: A woman from Alabama spends a year in Greece and shares her impressions. The classical statues are too beautiful and don't emphasize genitals enough. The icons of the Orthodox saints don't smile enough. The people don't smile enough. The wine is "bitter" or "stoney". The local banks won't let her have an account in her currency (dollars). Would a bank in Mobile allow an account in drachmas? This book is not an exercise in cultural relativity. The narrator often boasts of her knowledge of Greek, but her translations fall short of the mark. She confuses the word "power outage" with the word "vacation" and she hears the Greeks saying the the "power is taking a vacation". Cute, but not true. On a more serious note she distorts the key concept of "filotimo" (lit. "love of honor"), a quality that Greeks associate with a desire for dignity and self-sufficiency, into "hunger for prestige" and intolerance of criticism. She translates the triumphal exclamation of an Olympic gold medal winner (which in English would sound like "for Greece dammit!") into an unprintable obscenity that misses the point altogether. A chapter ends with this obscenity as if the narrator wants this negative image to linger. Several chapters end on such notes. When she doesn't mistranslate the Greek language she objects to the way the locals use it. She is antagonized by the use of "Mr and Mrs" before a person's name (a practise widespread through the Mediterranean: Monsieur et Madame, Signor et Signora, etc.). A hairdresser who goes by Mr. Emanuel, rather than dropping the Mr. in accordance to the US cultural norm, is made to appear pompous. The hairdresser's use of "Mr" gets much more airtime than the fact that he doesn't mind that she does not have enough maney to pay for the hairdo. We experience the people of Greece through long monologues that appear as if tape-recorded, without her participation or commentary. In general men are negatively portrayed, except a man she refers to as her friend, who wallows in self-pity and seems to hate being a Greek. The only woman who gets lavish praise is an inn-keeper who serves the narrator a meal with many smiles. Some less submissive women who befriend her (an actress and a tour guide) do not earn such praise . Other women are made to appear as man-crazy or obsessed mothers. It seems that unless the locals play Maimiti to the narrator's Christian Fletcher, they don't fare well. One of the most disturbing aspects of the book is that the narrator gets wined and dined by the locals and invited to their homes, and yet she develops no fellow feeling for them. Invited to a wedding, she criticizes everything from the too-lavish menu to the religious ceremony, which she finds politically incorrect. She is annoyed that the guests sing the American song "This land is your land...", becasue they cannot possibly grasp its populist message. While she comments freely (and quite subjectively) about any aspect of Greek society and history, when a local man refers (approvingly) to Clinton as a "pacifict" we get a long explication af how that man is ignorant of American politics and wrong. In another passage, she asserts that Greeks look pretty much alike and that makes it easier for them to stick together, while Americans look different from each other and have to work at unity. This book makes it seem OK to criticize someone else's religion and its symbols, to treat another language casually and to present a foreign culture in terms of a few negative stereotypes. In so doing, the author evokes in my mind some stereotypes about her place of origin.

Rating:
Summary: FINALLY, UNDERSTANDING MODERN GREECE
Review: Although it doesnt read very easily, this book offers a view to what modern life in Greece is like, how Greeks think and why. Highly enjoyable and recommended to understand better this Mediterranean culture.

Rating:
Summary: Tedious.
Review: As an individual more interested in Greek culture than the flighty musings of an irritatingly self absorbed poet/writer, I found this book a real disappointment. Ms. Storace seems more interested in concocting abstract, boring (though "pretty")metaphors than in immersing herself in the culture. The only concept this book seems to illustrate is how pleased the author is with herself.

Rating:
Summary: Worth its salt
Review: As I was reading "Dinner with Persephone", I often found myself in a mischievous mood and was tempted to draw parallels between the author and Henry James' fictional Henrietta Stackpole. But Patricia is much more than a conductor of travel experiences; she absorbs them, processes them through a well-rounded background, including a thorough knowledge of the Greek heritage, and delivers a highly inspired narrative. The following gives an idea:

'We weave through the traffic and when someone cuts in front of us, Theo leans out the window, pulls at an imaginary penis, and shouts, "Masturbate, masturbator! Play with it more! Keep masturbating!" There is a startlingly rhetorical, formal quality to Greek insults, almost as if the speaker were trained to take a theme and elaborate on it. It is a quality taken to its height in the orations of John Chrysostom, a Byzantine church patriarch who was a master of ornamental invective, as are a number of high-ranking contemporary Greek clerics. I wonder if I hear in Theo's imperative of contempt a trace of the Byzantine schooling in rhetoric, in which a student had to deliver patterned speeches both of praise and insult.'

Rating:
Summary: Joyless and tedious
Review: Before I savage this work, I must admit to having read only a third of it. Life is too short to have suffered through to the end when there are so many books on my "to read" list.

According to the author's short bio, Ms. Storace is an accomplished essayist and poet. "Dinner With Persephone" is her first book of prose. I think she should stay with her old job. I was hard pressed to see any evidence that she enjoyed the experience about which she was writing, i.e. living in Greece. She trudges from one vignette to the next with no apparent relish. Her prose is too often interspersed with such thoughts as: "The Greeks made their constellations out of myths and immortalities, but I am not Greek, so I trace my own out of history and mortality. I draw my imaginary line between two fireflies who have traveled an immense distance, a firefly conqueror audible for a moment in a word it was in his character to speak, and a temporary firefly consciousness who recognizes it." Oh, PLEASE, lighten up! I myself travel for the joy of it. I read travel essays to either picture in my mind's eye places I will probably never arrive at in person, or to begin to experience places to which I have a confirmed ticket. Neither purpose was served by this joyless, tedious book. I regret having spent the money to buy it.

Rating:
Summary: Slow moving nontravelogue book.
Review: Dinner With Persephone is a chronologically organized book about a woman's life and travels in Greece for a year. Though not Greek she speaks enough to be able to carry on philosophical discussions with the people she meets. Don't expect this to be a travelogue. It's more an explanation of the modern Greek taking into account past historical influences. She sees the Greeks as neither of the west or the middle-east neither modern nor like the ancients. Probably not unlike other groups in the Balkans, Turkey and that area. My wife read the book before our one week tour of Greece. She was not able to finish it. It has no story and nothing was familiar to her. I read it after our trip and found it helped to have been there and seen many of the scenes that she describes. The story doesn't flow very well. It seemed that she would travel someplace have some experiences and observations and instantly in the next sentence be back in Athens. I didn't think it was well written in the sense that I was never looked forward to getting back to reading the book when I took a break. I mostly read it on a train commuting to work. There is a diversion into a description of a children's book writers story which was interesting but seemed out of character with the rest of the book. I wouldn't recommend this book unless you are going to Greece and have an interest in understanding the people in depth.