On the Quay at Smyrna

On the Quay at Smyrna narrates in awful detail the violence and suffering wrought by the Turks during the Greco-Turkish War. It also recovers from the days before the city's sacking the sights and smells, the sounds and tastes, and the routines with all their tedium and richness, that characterized the lives of its inhabitants. Margot Demopoulos tells the story of Penelope, the daughter of a Greek Smyrniot banker and a mother renowned within the city and beyond as a healer. The family...
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On the Quay at Smyrna narrates in awful detail the violence and suffering wrought by the Turks during the Greco-Turkish War. It also recovers from the days before the city's sacking the sights and smells, the sounds and tastes, and the routines with all their tedium and richness, that characterized the lives of its inhabitants. Margot Demopoulos tells the story of Penelope, the daughter of a Greek Smyrniot banker and a mother renowned within the city and beyond as a healer. The family is cosmopolitan, planning a move to Paris in the autumn, where Penelope will study art. Their lives are comfortable, even privileged, and they are surrounded by the songs of the birds kept by Penelope's sister, Nikki, as well as the kilims, coffee, dates, and flowers for which Turkey and Smyrna were (and remain) famous. Penelope's best friend is the daughter of a French consular official. Her art teacher is French. Her new boyfriend is a Turkish Smyrniot who works for an American licorice company. Her concerns are those of a well-off young woman with a talent for watercolor and a blossoming illicit love.But Dempoulos also effectively limns the thinness of the line between war at a "safe" distance, and war as it closes in and finally breaks upon the city. With foreshadowing, imagery, and dialogue, she develops an ever-denser atmosphere of threat, building like the heat the narrator describes, discomfiting the reader as the heat disrupts the routines of the characters.