[Queuerriptota]

The boy?s mother and father have disappeared by the opening chapters and are likely dead. The boy is left with Grandmother, who speaks in riddles. The Germans have occupied the small Greek town. Everyone is starving and desperate. Freedom fighters lurk in the mountains, coming down sometimes to cause havoc. Everything is recounted in a dreamy, mildly hallucinogenic state:

An old man began to dig with teeth and nails for roots, moaning weakly from hunger.

Then two kids were blown to pieces by a land mine as they tried to disarm it and use the dynamite cakes to kill fish in the bay. I saw their little arms in smoking sleeves hung from a fig tree, trembling ? so simple.

The story is based, I presume, on Haviaras's childhood in Greece during the German occupation. Death is everywhere, described with a jagged, lyrical detachment. The author, whose first novel at the age of forty-three this was, has a keen feeling for the child's-eye view; there is a sense of standing in the middle of a stage full of horrible goings-on, yet not being a player, somehow removed from everything. There is a weightlessness, even freedom, to this short novel (that finds its fullest blossom in a surreal kite-flying contest towards the end), despite the grim subject.

Haviaras is a poet, and by the time of When the Tree Sings he had already published his own verse and edited a few poetry anthologies in English, his second language. The novel is chock full of poetic imagery. But writing a novel, even a short one, in an entirely "poetic" form is a difficult trick to pull off ? the chances of it sinking into tediousness are high. Though the novel does, on rare occasions, come off as too consciously polished, for every scene (the slim book is composed entirely of them, some running only half a page) that doesn't quite work for me there are a number that are vivid and beautiful and harrowing. It should be mentioned, too, that the darkness of the book is lightened by the author's love of low humor.

Haviaras is able to sustain the dreaminess and strange force of his remembrances from its barren, sunbaked opening ("a narrow strip between rocks and seas... It has no trees, no water ? only an illusion of trees and water") to its final flight in darkness. In the closing chapters the Germans are gone, but the jackals who have replaced them are not much better. The author's youth, after years of war and too many bitter memories, leaves home, walks away through the night: "this land which can only afford so many of us" can no longer afford him.