Father

Father is a short story collection by the Greek-French author Vassilis Alexakis, comprising eleven stories. The Chinese edition, translated by Liu Lu, is published by People's Literature Publishing House in its Short Classics series. Born in Athens in 1943, the author went to Lille, France, at seventeen to study journalism, moved to France in 1968, long supported himself as a journalist and cartoonist, and writes in both French and Greek; the original collection won the Académie française Short Story Prize in 1997. The characters are mostly intellectuals—journalists, filmmakers, professors—who are often pushed into amusing or even absurd extreme situations. In the title story Father, a strange little boy in the woods calls the narrator "father," though the narrator has never met the child; when he takes the boy home, the mother mistakes him for her husband. This chain of misidentifications seems bizarre but leads to real predicaments of family, intimacy, and belonging. Other stories—The Daughter of Ioannina, The Taxidermist, The Final, The Rocking Horse, Beautiful Eleni, Platini's Free Kick, Zoga, Alaska Cod, The Tweezers, The Hot-Air Balloon—similarly use spare, restrained language, poetic imagination, and light irony to portray modern loneliness, dislocation, and unnoticed feelings. The author says writing requires a "gestation period," and words are needed to rescue a thought or reveal a meaning. The book is concise, each story short—suitable for dipping into at random or rereading to savor what is left unsaid.