"The Full Catastrophe" -- James Angelos's fine book about Greece

The Full Catastrophe: Travels Among the New Greek Ruins, by James Angelos (Crown, 2015)

A belated blog post about this fine book. We read it before our recent trip to Greece. Below is a re-working of an email I sent Angelos. 

 

I am grateful that James Angelos wrote his wonderful book, "The Full Catastrophe". He avoided the sentimentality and attractive cliches about the "undying Greek spirit", "the Greek love of life", and all the rest, and wrote about Greeks accurately, as I have always known them. I felt as if I knew everyone in the book. No doubt, he'll get some flak from some Greeks for the disturbing overall portrait that emerges. I've seen other web reviews that call him a "self-hating Greek", which is absurd. Everything in the book struck me as true. If you love Greece, you love it even though so many around you seem to be gleefully conniving, scheming, cheating, and evading.

I was especially happy to read his pages devoted to the Jewish community of Thessaloniki, and the profound ignorance that so many Greeks express in regards to those lost lives. My wife and I visit the Jewish Museum in Thessaloniki on each visit, and we invariably find ourselves the only visitors.

Obviously, I don't know what Greece will be like in five years, but I think "Full Catastrophe" goes a long way in explaining whichever road Greece takes -- slow, agonizing reconstruction, or more agonizing disintegration.

I did have a few minor issues with the book. After reading about the various clerics in the book, non-Greek readers might have the impression, "Whoah, this is, like, a really religious country!" But in my experience, that's not quite true. There are churches and priests everywhere, and almost everyone seems to superficially observe some Orthodox rituals. Yet outside the major holidays, not that many people actually go to church (not even the rabid faithful) and very few people follow the more rigorous church traditions and fasts. You go to a church in Thessaloniki on an average Sunday and you see mostly some pensioners, and a few younger mothers dragging their squirming kids. Of university-educated people, there are almost none. Of the Left, none at all.

So how much influence does the clergy actually have on the population? Perhaps they have a little more influence lately, during this time of crisis when people feel broken. But I think that outside of a core of conservative faithful, their influence is very shaky.

This doesn't take away from Angelos's excellent descriptions of Prokopios and Maximos and the others clerics in the book; it's simply there is this paradox about Greek religious life -- it is more fragile than it would seem. After all, to me it was a sign of the weakness of the church that Golden Dawn and its khafiedes can appropriate the church's symbols and language of national unity. The clergy allowed this to happen.

Regarding the refugee crisis, I thought Angelos was a little hard on ordinary Greeks who are reacting badly to the waves of poor migrants. Even in Athens, many Greeks are essentially from small towns and villages, with a village mentality. They have no real knowledge of or understanding of the Africans and Syrians and Pakistanis showing up in their neighborhoods. They're aghast and terrified. These Greeks have been largely abandoned by their political leaders, and are now trapped in a steerage with people even poorer than they are. People act out in nasty ways when that happens. Angelos was a bit harsh on these people (though I appreciate his outlining the paradoxical xenophobia, bizarre anti-semitism that has always been part of Greek life -- right next to the famous Greek philoxenia).

There are some Greeks that I wish were represented a little more in the book. They are the ones who want to end the shambolic practices all around them, who want a functioning government, who want to start businesses and run them without paying off an endless stream of bureaucrats and political hacks, who want hospitals where relatives don't have to bring daily meals to their relatives, and on and on.There are a lot of these Greeks, and they desperately want to stay in the Euro zone as the only hope. These Greeks were somewhat absent from the book (and if things keep going as they are, these people will soon be absent from Greece as well, as they head to Germany, Australia, and elsewhere to find work).

These are minor issues. None of it reduces my feeling that this book is a great achievement.