Apartment in Athens (New York Review Books Classics)

Rating:
Summary: Wescott's study of character under adversity
Review: His 1945 APARTMENT IN ATHENS may lack the dazzling structurations of his recently rediscovered and greatly celebrated novella THE PILGRIM HAWK, but it is told with the same crystalline prose and is perhaps a deeper study of character. Mr. and Mrs. Helianos are a couple living in Nazi-occupied Athens forced to share their apartment with a melancholy German officer; vaguely mistreated by him, they learn to bear up under their hardships for a good year. Then he leaves for a vacation in Germany and returns behaving suddenly much more gently and kindly towards them, a change of heart that signals disaster for the lives of all of them. The story, inspired by an anecdote told by a Greek freedom fighter to Wescott, is perhaps not as dense as you'd like on first reading (there are none of the sort of Jamesian twists we might expect), but the difficult ethical positions of the Helianoses become clearer the more you think about the work later. This short novel is a very sophisticated study of the problems and evils inherent in human sympathy during a time of war.