ABSTRACT
In Thanassis Valtinos's national-prize-winning novel Data from the Decade of the Sixties, Greece's transition from a traditional economy and ideologically introverted culture to a nation with a supranational outlook on the path to westernization and global capitalism is portrayed as particularly problematic. This chapter explores some of the consequences that the novel's form has for its content and to investigate the implications for its treatment as a kind of referential historiography. It focuses on some hitherto undiscussed aspects of the novel's themes, plot and character development, relating observations to the issue of ideology. The novel's most prominent themes feature in two discernible groups of texts comprising its two main narrative axes, namely troubled inter-personal relations and Greek migration. Thanassis Valtinos's treatment of the Colonels' regime in Data is, perhaps unexpectedly, more playfully parodic than bitterly ironic, at times verging on sarcastic humour.
