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Antigone Kefala
Fiction

Antigone Kefala is a writer of poetic intensity and integrity. During her childhood, her family fled Romania and arrived in Greece as refugees, before settling in New Zealand and Australia. Her writing takes in the measure of history, which sounds like a gong through the everyday. Following her death in 2022, Giramondo has released two commemorative editions – simply titled Poetry and Fiction – which collect more than five decades of work. Fiction gathers seven of her novellas from The First Journey (1975) to Conversations with Mother (2002) and 10 of her stories.

Here the stirrings of life are ripe and rich: dark cherry confiture eaten in the shade of a tree, a refreshing plunge into a lake, a lighted candelabrum looming like a sunflower facing the day. The cry of a woman flies through an open window “as if wild geese are beating their wings”, and laughter is a “noise to warm the air”. These images belong to “the past that we could only revisit in dreams, that lived only in words between us”, according to the narrator of “The Island”, Melina. In urban New Zealand she observes the “perfectly roasted plexiglass chickens, eternally turning under the electric lights”.

Kefala’s characters navigate exile, migration and upheaval. They find themselves tossed to the winds of chance, vulnerable to atmospheres charged with cruelty and folly. In “Intimacy”, after Helen’s colleague asks her, “You’re not depressed? Are you? I hate to work with depressed women,” she announces to her mother: “I am moving forward with a sinking feeling.” Walking along the quay with an old friend, she feels “full of admiration and longing for the lost self that had been so free and clever”.

Kefala’s women are not dramatic. They are poised, observant, hungry in body and mind for freedom, beauty, authority. Restlessly they must remake themselves, constructing a sympathy between what they have abandoned and what they can now abide.

The titular character of “Alexia” reflects: “Language was more potent, inventive and durable than people imagined, and produced daily miracles that no one noticed any longer and everyone took for granted.”

Kefala’s sentences can be crisp and scrupulous, images sharpened to a point. At other times, her prose is like a riddle, closer to a sensuous dream-work, all photographic blur and spill. Reading across this collection one can recognise the shifts in Kefala’s style, her steady maintenance of a language that guards and gives generously. Her peculiar vision is both austere and lyrical, elegantly fluent in the secret ways of the self.

Giramondo, 382pp, $34.99

This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on May 24, 2025 as "Fiction".

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