As was also earlier the case with Greek Modernism, the very existence of Greek Postmodernism has been questioned and widely debated over the last two decades for reasons mainly related to the alleged absence of the necessary underlying socio-political conditions in Greece that would favour its development. Thus, scholars in Greece have often resorted to applying the adjective, ‘postmodernist’ to certain features of individual texts rather than talking about full-blown postmodernist fiction per se. Katsan appears fully aware that his title constitutes an overt and affirmative statement in this debate and acknowledges ‘the theoretical baggage it [i.e. the word ‘Postmodernism’ in the title] brings to the discussion'(184). Yet, whatever the outcome of this debate, Katsan's book, History and National Ideology in Greek Postmodernist Fiction, fills an important gap in the relevant critical/theoretical literature not only (and mainly) in the English bibliography but also among the available Greek studies on the issue of Greek postmodernist fiction and how this can be seen as inversely analogous to the dominance of issues of national identity in the contemporary Greek culture.

Katsan's convincingly-developed thesis is that a decline of interest in nationalistic ideologies and a relaxation of rigid views of national identity seem to have gone hand-in-hand with the appearance of Postmodernism in Greece. As he explains in the Introduction, the questions he intends to answer are whether there is actually a causal relationship here (i.e. between the adoption of Postmodernism and the weakening of a sense of belonging) or simply a correlation, and most importantly whether Greek writers imported metafictional techniques in an effort to keep up with their international colleagues (an issue which has also been raised in relation to Greek Modernism) or were responding to an indigenous cultural need, which coincided chronologically with postmodernist ideology worldwide. Although I am not certain that the reader gets any firm answers to these vexed questions by the end of the book, this does not reduce the significant contribution of the study overall. Indeed, Katsan himself indicates awareness of this inconclusiveness in the Epilogue, where in addition to expressing the opinion that Postmodernism is already at an end internationally, he also claims that its Greek version was a kind of a parenthesis in the history of Greek literature, as it failed to lead to “a wholesale change in attitudes about approaches to national identity in Greece that have been challenged in the novels I analyse” (178), before tentatively offering some predictions about what it may be followed by.

The book is divided into an Introduction, 5 chapters and an Epilogue. Chapter 1 presents a rich and well-researched survey of the existing international bibliography on the theory of literary Postmodernism; at the same time in this chapter the writer attempts to identify those (thematic) aspects of Postmodernism which are relevant to Greece's specific socio-cultural experience and which, in his view, appear to have been employed in its literary practice by Greek writers; these include Greekness and national identity, History (from Antiquity to Modern times) as historiography, the theme of exile and the sense of justice; all to be discussed in more detail in the chapters that follow.

Chapter 2 discusses the close relationship between the theme of exile and the preoccupations of postmodernist ideology (such as alienation, dislocation, fragmentation and a loosening of the sense of belonging) on a theoretical level and how this is encountered in the work of certain Greek writers whose novels appeared between 1965 and 1992 (all these writers having themselves been political exiles), as he convincingly concludes following close readings of his primary sources. These writers are: Melpo Axioti (My Home, 1965), Dimitris Chatzis (The Double Book, 1974), Alki Zei (Achilles' Fiancee, 1987) and Mimika Kranaki (Philhellenes, 1992) whom Katsan labels as “proto-postmodernists”. However, it is not entirely clear to the reader how this set of texts is different from the Postmodernists proper who are discussed in the rest of the book, particularly when these books are so different from each other and were published over a thirty-year period, with Kranaki's book appearing almost towards the end of the ‘official’ postmodernist period. Moreover, how can we talk about Postmodernism in the later work of Axioti (as well as Pentzikis also mentioned in the book), who employed similar metafictional techniques and espoused a non-Hellenocentric ideology from the very beginning of her career in the 1930s? Is it enough to simply posit temporal divisions when no others seem to exist?

Chapter 3 discusses how the act of remembering in some writers (both Greek and non-Greek) is rendered unreliable and used as a postmodernist tool to question the truthfulness and authority of history as well as of historical testimonies, which most of these texts also incorporate. More precisely, Katsan analyses and compares Thanassis Valtinos’ fiction (The Descent of the Nine, 1963, “Addiction to Nicotine”, 1984, Data from the Decade of the 1960s, 1989, and Orthokosta, 1994); Ares Alexandrou's Mission Box, 1974; Manuel Puig's Kiss of the Spider Woman; Vassilis Gouroyiannis, The Silverweed Blooms, 1992, and Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children, 1980. Through their fragmented testimonies, according to Katsan, Valtinos calls into question the ways in which history and ideology are constructed; Alexandrou investigates how power and Ideology interfere with a (philosophically-perceived) sense of justice, and Gouroyannis exposes the construction of fluid, shifting identities and thus ideologies in a multi-ethnic, multicultural community near the Albanian borders in North-West Greece during the German Occupation. These Greek works are compared with novels that are products of different cultures (those of Puig and Rushdie) which handle similar issues in an analogous way. In a similarly comparative approach, in Chapter 4, Katsan convincingly examines how the preoccupation with writing (auto)biography can be used as a means of questioning the authenticity and authority of official history and (rigid) national and cultural identity. Here he analyses three novels by Rhea Galanaki (The life of Ismael Ferik Pasha, 1989, I shall sign as Louis, 1993, and Eleni or Nobody, 1998), one novel by Orhan Pamuk (White Castle, 1990) and one by Angela Carter (Nights at the Circus, 1984).

Chapter 5 proposes a distinction between “thematic” (i.e. conservative in form) and “experimental” postmodernist Greek texts, also offering an overview of which fall into each category, though he himself admits that some of these works are a combination of both. Finally he presents a close analysis of Ersi Sotiropoulou's novel Zig Zag through the Bitter Orange Trees (1999), which, though conservative in form, in his view, “offers her most biting criticism of contemporary life in Greece” (164) and “illustrates the vapidity and meaninglessness of contemporary culture in general” (172).

My main reservations about this volume are related to the labelling, which is often restrictive and leads to some generalizations and oversimplifications. I would have liked a more tentative approach to certain assertions, such as “the maturation” of the novel in Greece started in the 1970s and did not flower before the 1980s; all the Modernists of the 1930s aspired to Greekness, and the Generation of the 1930s was a poetic generation. This being said, the present volume is an excellent work of scholarship, which contains valid observations about trends and tendencies in the fiction of the last 60 years, convincingly supported by meticulous analysis as well as comparison of the individual texts discussed here. Finally, one of the most important achievements of this volume is that it attempts to situate contemporary Greek fiction in the context of and as part of global (postmodernist) literature. For all these reasons Katsan's volume will be an indispensable work of reference for scholars of contemporary Greek fiction and students alike.