It was a morning of confinement, at the beginning of 2020, Victoria Hislop received a phone call at her home in London from Greek Prime Minister Kyriákos Mitsotákis. “I immediately recognized his voice, atypical, with a hint of an American accent,” the British novelist tells us, seated in the cafeteria of the Museum of Cycladic Arts in Athens. “He told me that he wanted to make me a citizen of honor of Greece for services rendered to the country and in particular for having promoted the history and traditions of Greece abroad. I was stunned, and flattered. Two months after confinement, I was received with great pomp in Athens by the Prime Minister and the President of the Republic Ekateríni Sakellaropoúlou, a wonderful woman.”
In the process, Victoria Hislop acquired a Greek passport. Very practical for facilitating her trips back and forth between England and her second homeland, particularly in Crete, where she bought a beautiful house. She tells us all this in French, perfected thanks to her mother’s French companion. Clearly, Oxford graduate Victoria Hislop, who also speaks Greek, a real star in her country as in Greece, is not a Brit like the others… And here she is at the head of her 9th novel, The Statuette, published almost simultaneously in London and Paris and soon in Athens. A river novel, where she mixes big and small history, the political and the intimate, social fractures and family frescoes – this is her trademark – against a backdrop of the dictatorship of the colonels and trafficking in works of ancient art.
The Island of the Forgottenthe novel that turned his life upside down
Star but not diva for a penny. What is striking when we meet the Bromley native is her simplicity and kindness, never stingy with a gift, as Sarah Rigaud, the editorial director of Les Escales, her French publisher, tells us, who explains that she The same goes for her husband, Ian Hislop, the equally renowned editor-in-chief of the satirical magazine Private Eye and conductor of the show Have I Got News for You from the BBC. And yet. Millions of copies around the world, including two in France alone, around thirty translations… the numbers have been alarming since the publication, in 2005, of The Island of the Forgotten (2012 in France), the novel that changed the life of journalist Victoria Hislop.
Small reminder: in 2001, on vacation in the north-east of Crete, the British woman discovered the existence of a small fortress island, Spinalonga, where hundreds of lepers lived, confined, until 1957, in order to avoid not infect the population. She investigates, her imagination ignites, global success of The Island of the Forgotten, boosted by its series adaptation by Greek television. Since then, she has written a series of “Greek” novels, not hesitating to tackle the most sensitive periods of the Hellenic Republic as in Those we love (2019) dedicated to the civil war, which engulfed the country at the end of the German occupation with the clash of the royalist government and communist militants from 1946 to 1949. “I was told ‘Don’t write there “above that, there is not enough perspective.” I insisted, and I actually encountered many divided families, but my novel is not binary, there were horrors on both sides… And When promoting my book, many young Greeks thanked me for introducing them to these parts of their history.”
Looting and trafficking of ancient works
Rebelote today with The Statuette. This time, she attacks the dictatorship of the colonels (April 21, 1967-July 24, 1974), the corruption of its dignitaries and the pillaging of works of art through the story of Helena the redhead, a little girl Anglo-Greek woman sent on vacation to her Athenian grandparents in the summer of 1968. In the luxurious apartment in the Kolonaki district, with a view of the Parthenon, the grandfather, General Papagiannis, maintains order – she will learn later that he supervised the places of detention of opponents of the military dictatorship and that he was paid for his services (promotion of one son, transfer of another) in statuettes and other ancient treasures.
Summers follow one another, grandparents die, Héléna, a student at Oxford, takes part in an excavation site on the island of Nisos, in the Cyclades, in the company of her boyfriend, the lively Nick. Lively but rather suspicious, the young man. Soon, the lover unearths the pot of roses, the pillaging of Nisos and trafficking, which she will never stop putting an end to. Just like Victoria, who is actively campaigning for the restitution of the bas-reliefs from the Parthenon in Athens kept for two centuries at the British Museum.
The Statuette, by Victoria Hislop, trans. from English by Alice Delarbre.496 p., Les Escales, €23.
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