Dinner with Persephone

September 1, 1997
An American poet describes a nation poised between pop culture and its mythic past.

October 2, 1996
A scoop of ice cream decorated with pomegranate seeds is the Persephone of the title--a Greek confection the author orders at a patisserie in Athens where she and a companion stop after a climb to the theater of Dionysus. Her companion chooses a "Leda"--two scoops of vanilla covered with rosettes and studded with tiny paper Greek flags. These are apt symbols of the great past that dominates the everyday life and consciousness of modern Greeks. Like them, Storace smoothly entwines her own daily encounters, during the year she lived in Athens, with the country's history and legends, current politics and neighborhood activities. A prize-winning poet, she has the advantage of a facility with the language, and has access to Greek friends and cultural guides who are often as probing and intellectual as she is. Her journal of that year provides minutely detailed observations, conversations, shopping tours, parties, religious and national holidays, passengers on a bus, street noises, visits to historic spots and even the plots of Greek movies. Though sometimes exasperating in its indiscriminate detail, at the same time the book immerses the reader more deeply than do many other accounts of an American abroad in a vibrant sense of the country's past and present.