ABSTRACT
The narrative is comprised of alternating internal monologues by several female members of a family and that of the Tree, whose "speech" solidifies the structure of the text. Mana, her daughter Eleni, and her granddaughter Roula are the three narrators who spin the mythistorical narrative that comprises 150 years of Modem Greek history and that involves no less than seven generations of the family. The text reveals several spatially and temporally distant narrative threads that ultimately converge at the site of a tragic family secret. Roughly summarized, the novel follows the experiences of Roula, a contemporary Athenian woman who is completely alienated from her rural family whom she has never met. Upon receiving a letter from her grandmother Mana, in which Mana pleads with her daughter Archontoula (who is also Roula's mother) to attend to her dying brother Fotos, Roula hesitantly embarks on a "voyage of discovery" to the little village symbolically named Rizes ("roots"), a place located off road routes, in order to fulfill the promise she had given to her dying mother that she would attend her uncle's funeral whenever summoned. Meanwhile, in Rizes the family is getting ready to carry out pagan funeral rites, which require that ritual flamboura1 be
mounted with the garments of first-bom male ancestors to guarantee the safe passage of the dying man to the other side. When one of the garments in the collection mysteriously goes missing, Mana, the matriarch of the family, performs a self-sacrifice by offering her bloody garment in place of the missing one, thus enabling her son to join the ancestral spirits. Through her sacrifice, Mana, an Asia Minor refugee of the Greek "Catastrophe" of 1922 and a village outcast, is able to firmly inscribe herself into the family lineage of her "man" Demos, who, although he had fathered all seven of Mana's children by repetitively raping her, would never recognize any of her children as his own. Roula's arrival surfaces also the family secret of her own mother's rape by Roula's father, and his subsequent murder at the hands of Roula's uncle, Fotos.2
