Tell Her

On the heels of two masterful story collections translated by Karen Emmerich, Tell Her trains an eye to a young courier in Athens who is writing down the world. Her days are spun with miraculous sights. Doors give way to rooms full of eye-shaped objects, or to cars parked right in the kitchen. She delivers a relic and helps glue it to a cane. She takes a pillow to a woman who asks if she can stay a while, just to know someone’s there. True boundaries are invisible, the courier says, exchanging parcels for a piece of someone’s loneliness, boredom, joy.

Like a shock of light through the novel comes Lena, the courier’s hairdresser best friend, who rides in her van each Monday. Practical where the courier is porous, Lena tapes her friend’s notes to the dashboard and ticks through the week’s wonders. It’s with Lena that the courier sets out on her most difficult route—the delivery of a young woman’s urn to a remote mountain village.

Christos Ikonomou is an anatomist of Greek life. He levels the cosmic, the weird, the mundane, and creates an urban litany. Reading Tell Her is like gazing at a distant city, awed by its vastness. We’re asked to slow down and unfortify ourselves—to make room for the pain of others.