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(Outline of an unpublished novel)
IERAPETRA, OR HIS SISTER’S KEEPER — This (postmodern) novel is about the attempt of a man to overcome grief and guilt through story telling. The narrator (German-born scientist, now in his 60s, residing in England) reminisces about the times he spent with his three-year younger sister, who succumbed to cancer in her early fifties. His memory centers around traumatic events during a trip he took with her to Crete during his college time, in the nineteen sixties, which left her with emotional scars and him with a perpetual feeling of insufficiency and guilt. Catalysts of these events were two tourists, a quirky Spanish woman and a self-important German student, whom they met on the trip. The narrator’s attempts to write about the events on Crete and their aftermath in the first person are futile, so he appoints a stand-in, Dieter, to recapitulate in his stead the Crete trip with his sister and the years after until her untimely death, in a conveniently distanced third-person story. Twice the narrator feels compelled to intervene at places where he believes Dieter is taking too many liberties, even to the point of heretically asserting his own agenda, free of concerns for the well-being of his sister. More than once the story touches upon their experience of growing up in post-war Germany in a provincial, puritan town. Between glimpses of its ancient cultures, Crete comes to life in its spectacular atmospheric light, its own brand of Greek island music and the vitality of its people. We hear of European echoes of the Vietnam protests and see hippies flood pristine beaches. Accounts of Dieter’s journey to Crete and his later meetings with his sister and the Spanish woman are illuminated by his reflections and diary entries. The relationship between the two siblings is marked by their claustrophobic upbringing, which they have been seeking to overcome, and later by the liberation of creative impulses after their father’s death.
Rather unexpectedly, I found a writeup of my unpublished novel “Ierapetra” on a Spanish website CNB DIVULGA, an online publication of Madrid-based Centro Nacional de Biotecnologia, posted on October 14, 2022. The piece is called “wantstobeawriter”, which I used as a moniker on my twitter profile. Ironically it was in October 2022 when I decided to leave twitter as I could not stand to be part of Elon Musk’s madhouse. Here is the Google translation:
WANTS TO BE A WRITER
by Carlos Pedrós-Alió
Dieter remembers that trip to Crete with his little sister painfully well. The one who died of cancer shortly after, leaving a void impossible to fill. The things that happened on that trip, the encounters with a unique couple, the Mediterranean light and the Greek ruins are mixed with his sense of guilt, of not having been by her side enough, perhaps even of having betrayed her. This is, approximately, the synopsis of a novel titled “Ierapetra, or his sister’s keeper.” It doesn’t really attract much attention, right? We could imagine the outcome and remember novels with similar plots. We might wonder if it is worth reading or not. But we will not know this. Because this novel has not been published. And the most unique thing is that the author is one of the winners of the 2017 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. Joachim Frank developed a technique to improve the resolution of electron microscope images, so that we can now “see” molecules. Units so small that before their invention they were only seen as a blur. The consequences of this advance are being spectacular. For example, researchers at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne were able to observe the famous “spike” protein of the omicron variant of the SARS-CoV-2 virus and identify the mutations that allowed this variant to become resistant to some vaccines. In fact, the CNB has one of the best cryo-electron microscopes in Europe, which takes advantage of the discoveries of Frank and his colleagues with whom he shared the Nobel Prize. But what interests me is that Frank puts “wantstobeawriter” in his mini-biography on Twitter. Frank always explains his frustration because he has already written four novels, but cannot find a publisher to publish them. He has only been able to publish a few poems and short stories in various magazines. He also has a website in which he says: “I started this site because nowadays one needs a presence to be present and physical presence is no longer enough to be seen in this nebulous virtual space.” That website is where I got the synopsis of Ierapetra.
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