Book Review: The Last Day of Paradise, by Kiki Denis

(Published Sept. 4, 2007 in BC Magazine--Book Review: The Last Day of Paradise by Kiki Denis)

The Last Day of Paradise is a cathartic coming of age story spanning three generations in small-town Greece.

Coming of age is a universal experience. At least nowadays it is. Adolescence as a distinct stage of life between childhood and adulthood, with its own culture, activities, rituals, products and angst, is a modern invention. Before that children were just little people growing slowly into big people.

But we need not go too far into the past to find out how much things have changed from one generation to the next, how different the expectations, behaviors and preoccupations of young people are today. Many of these differences have to do with larger societal changes. Kiki Denis's novel, The Last Day of Paradise, is a coming of age story spanning three generations in small-town Greece, narrated by fifteen-year-old Sunday. Her narrative not only captures how much things have changed since her grandparents' time, but also how much their actions, decisions, and experiences are carried over to affect her generation.

The Last Day of Paradise is Kiki Denis's debut novel. Born in Greece, she came to the United States in 1990 to pursue her BA in philosophy and economics at Mount Holyoke College on a full scholarship. She then went to Exeter, England to complete an MA in psychology before settling in New York City in 1997. There she began writing short stories, poetry, and this novel. She is currently working on her second novel, Noble Silence, and a poetry collection entitled The Cycle of Consciousness.

The language of The Last Day of Paradise is unique - sometimes funny, often jarring and disconcerting. Sometimes writers who choose to write in their second language are particularly good at capturing the voice of a second language learner. Denis tries to do that in this novel with Sunday. Just a few pages in, Sunday says that she is sure by now "you got a feeling that the language I am using here is not my mother/first tongue." She uses Greek during the day and English at night. And just in case the reader finds something weird about her use of language, she says: "'cause of this overworking situation, I may often use your language irrationally, inappropriately, over-loosely, but please spare the sweat..."

It's difficult to say whether Sunday's voice fails to convince because the second language aspect is not captured successfully, or because the author simultaneously attempts to capture teen-speak. The teen-speak is at times convincing, capturing the raw cynicism of modern Greek teen culture. I suspect it is the combination that proves ultimately too much for Denis to manage with consistency.

What's nice about the use of English in this novel is that it is not just Kiki Denis choosing to write a Greek story in English for the benefit of anglophone readers. Rather, it is written in English because Sunday, the young narrator of the story, likes to use English with her friends and chooses also to write about her experiences in English. Sunday and her clique use English as a sort of code language amongst themselves, a language most of the adults don't understand.

The real difficulty with the use of language in this novel comes through a lack of consistency and the overuse of certain words. When the author attempts to capture darker or more serious subject matter, the language tends to become more conventional, more regular. At these times, especially (though not exclusively) when the focus is on the older generations, the novel reads like good fiction and becomes rather engaging. Then, as if the author suddenly notices that she's slipped out of both the second language and the teen voice, one of those overused words, like "mega," appears, jolting the reader clean out of the narrative.

Denis has certainly imagined a very interesting and engaging story. At times her casual handling of really dark subject matter, like the repeated and rather routine sexual abuse of a servant girl by an aristocratic old man who fondly remembers the first time, "reaching for titties and found nothing," or the rape of the teenage girl a couple of days before her arranged marriage to a lawyer twice her age, is chillingly well executed. At other times, especially when it comes to the intermediate generation - the twenty-something men - the voice is not convincing. There seems something amiss in the characterization of that middle generation. They do not seem to have their own voice. Instead, they tend to have the same voice as the fifteen year old.

The Last Day of Paradise took some time to get into. Once into the story, because there really is some good substance between the pages, I wished the strange use of language would just disappear so that I could read without interruption. The overuse of certain words kept kicking me out of the story.

It was very difficult to place the novel as well. Is it meant to be a young adult novel with some serious content? Is it meant to be adult fiction that happens to be narrated by a teenager? Some people would probably not be comfortable with aspects of the book, particularly concerning sexuality, for young readers. Yet adults, though appreciating the multi-generational story and the serious treatment of class, arranged marriage, and sexuality, will have difficulty with the narrator's strange use of language.