George Sarrinikolaou, Facing Athens: Encounters With the Modern City

I am in deep, profound need of a light, funny book to read. Yes, I can chalk up much of that need to the seemingly endless tail chasing I've been doing lately, but Sarrinikolaou's Facing Athens is also due some share of the blame.

It is an almost unremittingly bleak read. Perhaps too much to assess it as "dark," it is not exactly melancholic either -- for though Sarrinikolaou closes out the book with a paragraph that casts the preceding in such a light, the idea of "melancholy" in remembrance suggests a certain degree of nostalgia, which is not something that Sarrinikolaou can muster.

It is... a cynical read of everything? Not snarky. It is not a chronicle of the Americanized exile returning with the knowing eye, regurgitating his own irony onto the city. No, not that. There is just... why go to Athens? Why did he go back to Athens?

Never having been to Athens, it is a hard thing to understand given the portrait of the city that Sarrinikolaou presents.

But it is also a perspective that he seems to carry regardless of his vantage point, or place:

"Because I was born to working-class parents and have lived only in cities, the problems implicit in the landscape -- poverty, poor urban planning, sheer ugliness -- have always claimed my attention. But as I held my baby, these problems acquired an urgency that had me fantasizing about a way out of Brooklyn."

From "The View From His Window" in the New York Times, 18 June 2006.

A hell of a burden to bear, surely. And one we all seem to carry about at times (regardless of what meets our eye on gazing out the window). But I was, sad to say, a bit relieved to put his down.

The fact that it became mine in the first place, of course, speaks both to the way I read and the way he writes. For what it's worth.