Review: The Murderess by Alexandros Papadiamantis

The Murderess [1902/83/2010] – ★★★★ Alexandros Papadiamantis (1851-1911) was one of the most influential Greek authors, and also an eccentric, reclusive man who wrote about the lives of the poor. One of his best-known novels is The Murderess, a strange, but spellbinding offering. It is a dark fairy-tale-like story about a far-off community in Greece that is in a constant state of want and sorrow. At its centre is an ageing woman called Old Hadoula or Frankissa or Frankojannou, whose family is also mired in poverty and who increasingly sees all the little girls around her as a liability instead of living and breathing human beings. Papadiamantis paired a Greek pastoral fable with a disturbing character study, and the result is one horrifying, but riveting read. The author plunges us into one dark, enclosed world where people live close to the state of nature, and that also means that moral boundaries become erased and human considerations often give way to the principles of utilitarianism. This may remind of the situations in Shichirō Fukazawa’s novel The Ballad of Narayama or in Akira Yoshimura’s novella Shipwrecks. In the former, a village practises ubasute, a tradition of leaving...