The title piqued my interest: Archipelago. With five syllables, the cadence mimics the rhythm of waves. The physical terrain — in this case, the rugged land masses scattered along the Dalmatian coast — lured me into Natalie Bakopoulos’ story, reminding me of Croatian American writer Courtney Angela Brkic’s novel, The First Rule of Swimming. Ultimately, I followed the siren call to dwell in the liminal spaces of midlife with Bakopoulos’ unnamed female protagonist, who is both anchored and adrift.

Complexity defines the protagonist/narrator from the start: her Greek and Ukrainian lineage connecting her to places far beyond the Detroit neighborhood where she was raised; her ambiguous status as neither native nor tourist in the region; her familiarity with, but not fluency in, numerous languages. As a translator spending a two-week residency on a Croatian island, she works in the middle between author and reader to interpret Greek texts and convert them into English without sacrificing nuance. Her larger task involves defining herself.

Morning swims in the Adriatic Sea at a local beach reminiscent of her childhood excursions to her grandparents’ home near the Ionian Sea become a daily ritual for her. The narrator observes another female swimmer, whom she refers to as “my twin.”

As the novel progresses, her least complicated identity, that of an “untethered” woman, gradually blurs when she runs into Luka, a Croatian writer she’s known for 20 years, at a rooftop party. He calls her “Natalia,” a name he gave to the protagonist of his unpublished novel. She answers to this without knowing how he has defined her on the page. Their ease in being together eventually prompts her to rent a room from a local elderly woman and remain after the residency concludes. But to label the relationship a love affair would imply passionate coupling. Instead, the narrator remains somewhat detached:

“I suppose I’d say we were seeing each other, though even that doesn’t quite describe it. No matter. For a while, I settled happily into this new life that had been written for me. This life, this name.”

Their connection develops over a course of weeks while Luka and the narrator work separately, until the latter finishes the first draft of her translation and experiences a restlessness. A discernible shift occurs when the narrator wakes one morning to find Luka gone from her bed. By the time her landlady notices his absence, the narrator has taken possession of some of his abandoned belonging and set her course for her family home in Greece. Driving Luka’s car, she navigates a route alternately familiar and foreign.

Bakopoulos places her protagonist in the crosshairs of the region’s socioeconomic and geopolitical identity, starting with her arrival on the ferry, when a man overhears her and her friend complaining about the ways tourists have changed the area. Once they disembark, the stranger comes close enough with his car to send the narrator sprawling on the pavement.

Midway through the book, her relationship with Luka puts her in touch with an expat community on the other side of the island, away from the more touristy destinations. Luca’s friend Ivan lives off the wealth his father accumulated in the real-estate ventures that have strained the infrastructure and that leave Luka and others with far more modest housing. Her own family home in Greece belongs to her not through a legal deed but via her stewardship of the place over the years.

Throughout the novel, the narrator associates violence with men, starting with the boys who carjacked her in Detroit years earlier. The pattern persists with the man from the ferry. These episodes haunt her dreams. Yet when someone steals Luka’s car in Greece and leaves her belongings in the parking spot, she sees the humor in it — the car doesn’t rightfully belong to her. 

Archipelago explores the themes of wandering and homecoming found in The Odyssey and teases many Homeric conventions. Instead of deities, the dream world intrudes frequently. In some instances, dreams echo actual violence the narrator experiences, like the novel’s inciting episode just off the ferry. Dreams distort sound to make a boat’s horn sound like a train.

Both memory and premonition play a large role in the protagonist’s reality, yet she struggles not against hubris but against society’s labels. Older women often guide her to safety, and the novel’s interiority is reminiscent of Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway. Its depth invites rereading, with a sense that each visitation will unearth another treasure. Although the narrator ultimately finds herself firmly rooted on the mainland, she admits:

“I am still all those archipelagos in the distance and that elusive border between land and sea, where I write myself and erase myself, where I remember myself, again.”

Wendy Besel Hahn was the nonfiction editor for Furious Gravity, an anthology of 50 women writers in the Washington, DC, area. Her work appears in the Washington Post, HuffPost, Hippocampus, Sojourners, and elsewhere. She lives and writes in Denver, Colorado.