“This is not a story about logic,” the unnamed narrator of Natalie Bakopoulos’s Archipelago reminds us, as she begins her journey back to Greece. “It’s a story about theme and variation and echo... About what it all felt like.”
This disavowal of logic is purposeful and consistent throughout the narration, which resists the easy linkages of cause and effect. The narrator’s story begins with an unsettling, nearly violent encounter on a ferry across the Aegean. The narrator locks eyes with a man whose expression is “somewhere between intimate and hostile,” as if he knows her, but she has never seen him before. After disembarking the ferry, the narrator is standing in the street attempting to hail a cab when she hears an engine rev behind her—the same man from the ferry swerves into her path. “I didn’t think he was trying to hit me,” the narrator qualifies, “but he wanted me to know he could have.”
In another novel, this eerie encounter might be the first clue to a vast conspiracy, and by act four we would discover that the hostile ferryman was a long-lost estranged brother, or a spurned and forgotten ex-lover, or that the narrator had a doppelganger on the ferry, who is now in grave danger. But this is not that kind of novel, and to its enormous credit, it does not pretend to be. Coincidences, oddities, and shivers of foreboding stand alone as discrete experiences; when they do cohere, it is on the subtextual level of the story, not on the level of plot.
As it stands, the plot is relatively simple. A middle-aged translator has left the States with no tethers or timeline for her return. She participates in a writing residency on the Dalmatian coast of Croatia, and when the residency ends, she stays, renting a small apartment and beginning a loosely defined love affair with an old friend named Luka. This continues until it doesn’t; there is no ticking clock, merely stasis one day and movement the next, as the translator follows a sudden, consuming urge to drive down the coast to Messenia, returning to a family home in Greece that has fallen into her possession.
The novel proceeds chronologically, but the chronological has very little to do with the movement of the story, which shifts more like a tide, from observation to reflection, experience to interpretation, and back again. The emotional peaks of the novel take place in moments of solitude, triggered by nothing: “On the first night, I woke with a start, completely unaware of where I was... I’m in a box, I thought. I even wrote it down: This is not a place but a box... I forced myself out of the bed, even though I felt pinned to it.” But the terror dies as quickly as it came: the narrator steps out on the terrace and sees two of the younger translators laughing over a late dinner. “Their joy calmed me down,” she says, “and I suddenly felt sleepy and safe. I returned to my room and slept well until sunrise.”
Even the narrator’s relationship with Luka resists escalation. Their intimacy is immediate; there is no build-up, no need for one to reach out a daring hand to the other. “Things were easy between us, me and Luka,” the narrator says. “Because of this new status between us, it was difficult for me to remember what things had been like before, how we had interacted, how he had seen me and I him.” There is no transition on the opposite end, either, no arguments, no miscommunications. “I did not ask him for any explanations,” the narrator says, late in the story. “Somehow, I didn’t need them.”
The only steady forward progression in the narrative is the narrator’s work on her translation project, of a novel that does not mirror Archipelago but echoes it: there is a house, an old friendship, a love disappointment, a ship, a departure. Though the project has no deadline, the narrator finishes the translation “at great speed, feeling as though the book were unraveling and I was chasing it down a long staircase, while trying to pull a dress over my head.” When she finishes, she is “gutted... hollowed out.” The end of the translation marks the end of her time in Croatia, not because of story logic, but because of subtextual logic: “I had the sense that I was disappearing, that if I stayed put I would be gone in the morning. It was bizarre and illogical, I knew. But I had to go, now or never.”
There is something unaccountable about the pleasure of reading this novel. When opportunities for conventional storytelling arrive—a lover’s sudden disappearance, a wealthy local who hosts ostentatious parties, a car accident, a case of half-mistaken identity—the novel calmly steps aside and lets them pass. This works only because of the strength of the author’s conviction: there is no insecurity here, no concession to the reader’s preoccupations when they diverge from the narrator’s. This confidence is in keeping with the narrator’s depiction of menopause and midlife: “an opening up to an expanse of very blue sky on a clear, warm day, the melancholia having burned off like a fog...” The narrator is telling, on her own terms, the parts of the story that matter to her, and because the novel has its own vision of success—to tell us “what it all felt like”—it succeeds beautifully.
Among the more striking sections are those that deal with the act of translation: “Voice, for me, was the hardest thing to re-create. Sometimes it felt as though voice bodied through me, a three-dimensional thing of both language and its shadow. Other times it felt as though I thrashed between the lines of text, coughing, water lapping into my mouth, catching my arm on a word, a phrase.” This mixing of metaphors is spectacularly evocative; there’s a truth being grappled for and nearly caught hold of, like the words the translator is reaching for.
That feeling of elusive truth is so often missing from so-called “lyrical” writing, which obfuscates what is obvious, referring to commonplace objects with intricate euphemisms. Whereas in Archipelago, beauty is employed for truth’s sake, and when something can be declared simply, it is: “I opened a beer and stood in the middle of the kitchen and cried... I had felt myself holding something in, and now it all poured out of me.” Beautiful novels are common, but elegant novels are rare, and Archipelago is elegant in its honesty, its quiet wisdom, and its undaunted reckoning with the limitations of the stories we tell ourselves.
“Something of me had come productively unhinged,” says the narrator, and the same is true of form itself in Natalie Bakopoulos’s third novel. For those willing to unhook themselves from the conventional expectations of plot, Archipelago is a singular, meditative, and absorbing read.
Devon Halliday is a Pushcart Prize winner and a Rona Jaffe Foundation Graduate Fellow. Her short stories appear in Ploughshares, One Story, West Branch, Fence, Adroit, and Ninth Letter, among other journals. Her debut novel To Stay, To Stay, To Stay is forthcoming from McSweeney’s in 2026.