English novelist Jonathan Coe has no idea why Greek readers love him so much, but just a few days ago, “The Accidental Woman” – the first book he wrote, at age 23 – was published in Greek by Polis, under the title “Maria, Woman of Coincidences.” It is one of the few books of his own that he can bear to listen to in audio form
Coe spoke to Kathimerini shortly before traveling to Crete and to the Hania Book Festival, where he is holding a talk on Friday, June 26, alongside his regular Greek translator, Alkistis Trimberi.
Your Greek readers will read your first novel after your later books. What do you expect them to discover in this early work?
It will give them an insight into the writer I was before I found my voice. There is some of the humor that you find in my later novels, but none of the politics or social engagement. At the time I wrote it, I was very immersed in 18th-century English literature, and in the novels of Samuel Beckett, so those are the main influences on the book, and they give it a very different flavor from my more famous novels like “What a Carve Up.”
I was struck that your first book is one of the few that you are interested in listening to again. Do you not recognize yourself and therefore treat it with a slight exoticism? Like when we listen to our younger voice in a recording and we wonder, “Is this really me”?
