Krisanthi's War

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Like Homer's The Iliad, Ida Egli's new novel, Krisanthi's War, is an antiwar epic that brings together the personal and the political and wanders back and forth from the 1930s to the 1980s. The war is World War II. Krisanthi is a modern-day Greek woman who chronicles the lives and the deaths of her family members who strive to survive during the invasion and the occupation of their homeland by German soldiers. Since the characters are mostly Greeks, they have names like Achilles, Penelope and Kalliope, and, since they're Greeks, the Trojan War isn't ancient history, but part of the living, breathing present. Krisanthi's War is full of the sights and the smells of olives and goats, blood and wine, even as it explores the nature of orthodoxy and mystery. When liberation comes and the characters emerge from cellars and go into the Mediterranean sunlight the reader feels a sense of exhilaration and joy. It isn't revenge or punishment that the author is after, but rather empathy and compassion. Egli offers no easy-to-follow recipe for how to endure in our own difficult times, but she does provide at the end of her narrative a recipe for Loukoumáthes, those delicious fritters often drizzled with honey that melt in your mouth. If you want to meet real Greeks, explore Greek history and fathom the nature of love itself, this book is for you.