Review: The Murderess by Alexandros Papadiamantis

The Murderess [1902/83/2010] – ★★★★ 

Alexandros Papadiamantis (1851-1911) was one of the most influential Greek authors, and also an eccentric, reclusive man who wrote about the lives of the poor. One of his best-known novels is The Murderess, a strange, but spellbinding offering. It is a dark fairy-tale-like story about a far-off community in Greece that is in a constant state of want and sorrow. At its centre is an ageing woman called Old Hadoula or Frankissa or Frankojannou, whose family is also mired in poverty and who increasingly sees all the little girls around her as a liability instead of living and breathing human beings. Papadiamantis paired a Greek pastoral fable with a disturbing character study, and the result is one horrifying, but riveting read.

The author plunges us into one dark, enclosed world where people live close to the state of nature, and that also means that moral boundaries become erased and human considerations often give way to the principles of utilitarianism. This may remind of the situations in Shichirō Fukazawa’s novel The Ballad of Narayama or in Akira Yoshimura’s novella Shipwrecks. In the former, a village practises ubasute, a tradition of leaving the elderly to die in remote, mountainous places, while in the latter, a coastal communty survives on shipwrecks, which are enabled. The need to survive also hardens the hearts of some on the island of Skiathos in Papadiamantis’s book, leading to acts of cruelty, and none is probably more hardened by life than the cunning and resourceful Hadoula, who is a village expert in herbology and is also rumoured to dabble in magic. She had seen young men of her village, including her own sons, going to far-away lands and never returning, while the girls and women are forced to endure unimaginably hard living conditions, that are made worse by their need to find husbands (who are often drunken layabouts) and then dowries, which must include not only money, but also property.

In this story, Hadoula reckons that by depriving young girls of their lives she can actually make lives of their respective families easier. That is one twisted thinking, and Papadiamantis shows us just how thinkable this apparently unthinkable concept can actually become when one has lived the life of Hadoula, who was forced to endure a lot with her own family and their stinginess. Hadoula is essentially a serial killer in the making, developing sadistic, psychopathic tendencies: “She imagined herself escaping from dungeons and prison, but prison and Hell were within her” [Papadiamantis/Levi, NYRB Classics, 1902/83/2010: 82]. In the story, we find ourselves in the present, but also increasingly in the past as Hadoula recalls her unhappy childhood, when her mother was branded a witch, as well as her own marriage in which she was also deprived of happiness and comfort she thought was due to her. In the present, Hadoula is nursing her grandchild, a sickly girl who has just been born. That girl is christened “Hadoula” after her grandmother, but Hadoula isn’t happy at all. The circumstances of the family are dire, and the temptation to get rid of the new “burden” becomes too much for the increasingly deranged old woman. “Isn’t there always death and always a cliff?”, asks Hadoula.

At times, the author wraps his narrative in dreamy unreality, offset by the haunting beauty of Greek wilderness, and at other times, we are in the realm of blood-chilling horror scenes. The last part of the book is akin to a chase thriller because the long arm of the law is finally closing in on Hadoula, whose murder spree can no longer be hidden. In this part, we also see the awakening of a tormented conscience, and Hadoula moves from rationalising her evil to finally wanting to repent.

🏺 The Murderess was translated from the Greek by scholar Peter Levi (1931-2000), who ensured that the translation conveyed the poetic and the archaic. It is a simple tale about a woman slowly embracing death over life, and although it has compelling notes of a moral crisis in progress, it never quite reaches the heights of Dostoevskian pathos. Instead, it succeeds in unveiling the horrifying beneath the ordinary and the unassuming, thereby producing an unsettling and atmospheric read.

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