THE UNWANTED DEAD

Nikos Kazantzakis, the author of The Last Temptation of Christ, dies, leaving his wife alone to return his corpse to a country that doesn’t want him in Pratanos’ debut historical novel.

Pratanos offers a tale modeled after a mythical and classical nostos. In 1957, Helen Kazantzakis, in her bereavement, stands meditating in the German city where her famous husband has just died. The odyssey that unfolds follows the widow as she works to bring the body of her beloved back for a funeral on his home island of Crete. As she moves through her journey, traveling from Germany to France and Greece, the novel reveals the backstory of her and her husband’s romance as well as her wandering thoughts as a woman reckoning with loss. Helen’s point of view illuminates a delicately rendered landscape of Mediterranean waves and rich inner turmoil. She provides the heart of the novel; the main focus, however, is the esteemed and controversial author in her recollections. The book can be enjoyed as a work of researched historical fiction; the author brings midcentury European locales to life, complete with a recurring image of celebrity Jayne Mansfield arriving in Athens and the governmental squabbles that turned powerful Greek people against Kazantzakis, resulting in his “self-imposed exile” in France. The detailed background is immensely helpful in grounding the reader in the Athens of the era. However, Pratanos relies often on conversations between young journalist Freddy Germanos and his supervisors to present information that could have been more finely woven into the narrative. These moments of expository dialogue—along with the many times that characters bring up Kazantzakis’ Nobel Prize snubs—are disappointing intrusions. The novel works best when focusing on resonant, moving scenes of Helen in transit.

An often didactic tale of travel that’s most successful when it looks inward.