Exploring sin, guilt and atonement, this dazzling study of displaced lives has the moral complexity of the greatest novellas The epigraph to Karnezis’s celebrated short story collection, _Little Infamies _(2003), quoted CP Cavafy: unforeseen disaster “suddenly, violently, descends upon us ... sweeps us away”. Somewhere between novel and novella, _We Are Made __of Earth_ is Karnezis’s most perfect exposition of this theme. A dinghy full of refugees capsizes. A desperate man who can’t swim grasps a doctor; won’t let go. Enraged, the doctor frees himself, before impulsively ripping off the man’s life jacket, flinging it out of reach. Everyone drowns except him and a boy he elects to save. Though when the boy says, “The life-jacket. I saw you”, and latches on to him like a nemesis, the doctor regrets his compassion. The theme of the compulsive crime, committed by a civilised person for reasons beyond his comprehension, drives the story. The doctor, Mokdad, and the lad, Jamil, reach a small Greek island, where “from among the trees an Asian elephant was shyly looking at them”. The creature belongs to a circus whose owner, Damianos, and wife, Olga the elephant keeper, offer them hospitality. If we expect the circus to provide an element of the carnivalesque, we are mistaken. The elephant is displaced, stranded, forsaken, like everyone else. Damianos, whose business has failed, faces bankruptcy on the mainland if he leaves the island: the elephant is his sole, precious commodity. Mokdad will abuse Damianos’s hospitality. Conflicted, guilt-stained, mired in equivocation, he seeks an inaccessible atonement, inspiring the reader’s painful pity. Continue reading...
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