Aphrodite and the Others

the long version

Aphrodite, illiterate wife of a village priest, lived for eighty-eighty years in her Peleponnesian village. 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 so formidable in her domestic power. As well, Gillian recounts her slow but absorbed learning of other days and other ways, so that this book in not simply Aphrodite's story, but also a counterpoit 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.