Gefyra Book Club: “Eleni, or Nobody” by Rhea Galanaki
Gefyra Book Club: Eleni, or Nobody by Rhea Galanaki, trans. David Connolly
(Northwestern University Press, 2002)
Discussion led by Professor Sharon Gerstel, Director, UCLA SNF Hellenic Center and
Dr. Eirini Kotsovili, Senior Lecturer, Global Humanities at Simon Fraser University
Saturday, February 8, 2025
10 a.m. Los Angeles / 8 p.m. Greece
By Zoom
This academic year’s book club is held in English and will feature Greek books in translation. For future book selections and meeting dates, click here.
Eleni Altamura, favored by her father for her daring spirit and talent for painting, is fabled to be Greece’s first “woman” painter. Rather than consent to spinsterhood at the age of twenty-seven, Eleni sets sail with her seafaring father for Italy, where she is to study painting at the famed School of the Nazarenes. Once in Naples, Eleni flees her female identity and, disguised as a young man, walks with her father to Rome. Along the way she falls in love with her would-be husband while learning to navigate life in a man’s world, as a man. Eleni, or Nobody depicts the struggle between the female and male sexes, Greek and foreign culture, Greek Orthodoxy and Catholicism, and erotic love and motherhood. Every morning Eleni’s rebirth as Nobody allows her to overcome the constraints of her gender and partake in her life’s struggle. Love reveals her femininity, however, and Eleni converts to Catholicism in order to marry the father of her two children. When she is later deserted, Eleni is left with a shattered identity, having been rejected by her husband because of her masculine ways and exiled from the art world because she is female. After the death of her two children, Eleni spends the last twenty years of her life living alone. She continues to questions her identity as her life choices begin to spark various rumors that she may be either a powerful, mad magician or just another crazy, old woman.
Rhea Galanaki is considered Greece’s foremost woman novelist. She was born in Crete in 1947 and studied history and archaeology at the University of Athens. She is the author of several books of poetry and criticism as well as two other novels, The Life of Ismail Ferik Pasha (Peter Owen, Ltd., 1996) and Eleni, or No One. She lives in Patras, Greece.
David Connolly is a professional translator and has translated 15 works by leading Greek poets and novelists.
This program is made possible thanks to the Stavros Niarchos Foundation (SNF).
Links to purchase book, translated by David Connolly:
The Gefyra Book Club meeting is part of Gefyra (Bridge), a collaborative program established by the UCLA SNF Center for the Study of Hellenic Culture and the Simon Fraser University SNF Centre for Hellenic Studies with support from the Stavros Niarchos Foundation (SNF).
