APHRODITE AND THE OTHERS

What happens when Aphrodite, an illiterate wife of a priest living in a Peloponnesian village in Greece, meets her Australian daughter-in-law who comes to visit and unexpectedly stays?

Award winning Gillian Bouras answers this question in her book Aphrodite and the Others (160 p, paperback, 16.00) where she describes her life as a foreign wife in Greece, and the challenges she faced in living within Greek culture and society and how she came to terms with her greek mother-in-law. Her book received a NSW State Literary Award in 1994. Most of the works she has published since then, both autobiographical and fiction, explore the themes of exile, cultural identity, and family.

Professor Angela Kiossoglou Adams says, in her carefully crafted, thoughtful prose, Gillian Bouras presents us with two worlds: that of the illiterate village woman living in the oral tradition and that of her literate daughter-in-law who comes from outside the tight boundaries and set expectations of Greek village life. Yet while describing the different perceptions of each woman for the other, with sensitivity and humour, the author draws parallels between their lives and shares intriguing insights into the "received life" of village women in the Peloponnese which helped open her eyes to the "received life" she lived before being thrust into a new cultural milieu.

Aphrodite, illiterate wife of a village priest, lived in her Peloponnesian village for eighty-eight years. When she was seventy-two, her Australian daughter-in-law came to visit. And unexpectedly stayed. In writing the story of Aphrodite’s life, Gillian Bouras also relates her own story, that of an educated Westerner having to adjust to a woman who was so culturally different, and who was formidable in her domestic power.
As well, Gillian recounts her slow but absorbed learning of other days and other ways, so that this book is not simply Aphrodite’s story, but also a counterpoint of the oral tradition and the literate one, the personal and the political, with individual village voices murmuring against the clamour of wider European events.