500 Words with Theodoros Grigoriadis

Theodoros Grigoriadis keeps three very different books beside his bed: Ian McEwan’s “What We Can Know,” which has absorbed him; Mikela Chartoulari’s “61 Polaroids of the Greek Adventure,” a collection of 61 conversations about issues affecting society and global citizens; and Eleni Giannakaki’s “Cretan Pilaf,” a moving novel by a writer he greatly appreciates.

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We also learn from the negative things many times.

Grigoriadis, born in Palaiochori, Kavala, in 1956, has written 12 novels, four short-story collections and three works of narrative prose. His novel “Borderline Life” won the State Novel Award. “The Father’s Song” received the Nikos Themelis Award, while “The Nostalgia of Loss” won the short-story prize of the magazine anagnostis. Patakis recently reissued “The Dancer in the Olive Grove.”

Reading, he says, can also teach through failure. He describes a clever, affected novel by a relatively young writer as an example to avoid. The lesson he draws from writing is that the author’s self should disappear, allowing characters to speak and breathe on their own.

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In writing, the authorial self disappears and we let the characters speak and take their own breaths.

He also remembers nearly being expelled from a Greek literature class at a six-year secondary school during the junta. While the class read an old-fashioned, now-forgotten local-colour writer, he laughed ironically at one point. His philologist responded with a hard slap, an experience he says he never forgot.

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His personal language. The story it struggles to tell, and that hidden or visible force that makes it literary in my eyes.

His ideal reading moment belongs to his teenage self, sitting before a window looking toward the mountain while reading Zola’s “The Beast Within.” He is drawn generally to fiction, metafiction, autofiction, noir and fantasy, while keeping some distance from historical novels. Poetry and theoretical texts also fill his reading. What moves him most in a book is its personal language, the story struggling to be told and the hidden or visible force that makes it literary in his eyes. Asked which book he would like to see filmed, he names Roberto Bolaño’s “The Savage Detectives” or “2666.”

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I believe in the timelessness of books.