ABSTRACT
This chapter articulates the critical dimensions of the landscape of "home". Eleni N. Gage evokes in North of Ithaka: A Journey Home Through a Family's Extraordinary Past, a tale of home coming and reconciliation that opens as travel memoir, crosses over to a do it yourself manual, follows conventions of the "relocation narrative" genre, offers a rich ethnography of the village of Lia, and ultimately evolves into a family saga that proves the regenerative powers of "home". The authors view, Gage's work charts the complex course of an ethnic literary aesthetic sensibility that redefines traditional notions of spatio temporal shifts, self-representation, and identity formation, by assigning "memory" and "invention" a powerful role in imposing order on the confusing dynamics of past, present, future, memory, the living and ghosts, loss and gain, and cultural identity and difference. The psychological and sentimental affiliation that, Lia home inspires in Eleni discovery of her "fulfilled and integrated self" as relational being in the world.
