FROM THE CYCLOPS CAVE

Schofield’s memoir chronicles his turbulent life in America and Greece.

The author, who hails from California, first visited Greece as a tourist in 1976. On a subsequent trip to the country, he decided to stay. He initially earned a living by teaching English, “traveling to the homes of young Athenians, tutoring them for the American TOEFL exam and the British First Certificate and Advanced.” Eventually he looked for “a quiet place to write, something simple and far away from tourists.” He wound up renting a house in a remote area on the island of Kýthnos. His “whitewashed hut in the Cycladic style,” nicknamed the “Cyclops Cave,” is the inspiration for the memoir’s title. (The Cyclops Cave certainly has its peculiarities; at one point, Schofield puzzles over what sort of creature had taken some bites out of a peach.) Interspersed with scenes from Schofield’s life in Greece are memories from the author’s rocky upbringing. At the age of 4, he was handed off by his father, a Greyhound bus driver, to a foster family living in Fresno, California. One of the stipulations of the foster care was that his birth mother would never be allowed to see him, “no matter what.” He was raised for years by a man and woman he called Nan and Papa. Nan was in her 20s and came from a Catholic Italian family; Papa was a Cherokee in his 40s. Papa could be a playful practical jokester, though he could also turn violent and was prone to severe mood swings. Schofield was 8 when his father married a woman named Nora; he left Nan and Papa for Sacramento. Life with his father and Nora proved difficult, and it wound up being a temporary arrangement. The author spent a period in his teens bouncing between Catholic school and various homes.

As the memoir moves back and forth between different periods, it offers some potent scenes. In Greece, the author encountered rural people who used every part of the animals they slaughtered and were unperturbed by the associated sights. He remembers seeing three slaughtered baby goats with “congealed blood caked along the edge of their open lips” as if they were “three singers from the dead crooning into one microphone.” Schofield recounts an occasion when, back in the U.S., he visited Papa in a “dingy motel off I-80,” where he found the now-old man “sweating on crumpled sheets, back propped up on a stained pillow, his rusty wheelchair folded up in a corner, no nurse in sight.” When he lived with Nora, she made it clear that it was her house, governed by her rules. The author recalls not being allowed to play on the lawn: “All I can do is sit on the patio or stand in the driveway and throw my tennis ball against the garage. Over and over.” In Catholic school, Schofield was punished for smoking cigarettes by being forced to smoke a cigar. The memoir teems with such vivid recollections, transporting readers to memorable moments.

A finely detailed, enveloping look at life in two disparate countries.