
Member Reviews

I really wanted to like this more. The writing style is beautiful and strong, but, unfortunately I couldn’t get into the plot. The commentary sounds interesting and profound, but I felt like the story dragged too much. The main character never felt like a real person. I know this is a work of fiction but I need to be able to relate to the protagonist. I think the prose helped to finish it. This book had potential but lacked urgency and passion.

First off, thank you to Netgalley, the author, and publisher for this Advanced Readers Copy.
Let me start with the writing in this novel. It is gorgeous. There is no doubt about that. It’s atmospheric, enticing, and makes the whole story feel like a daydream. For the first half of the novel, I was convinced this would be a 5 star read. I loved the plot, the setting, and overall ideas of the piece.
This book works best in its deep look at the act of translation. Particularly, the fact that Luka has translated a version of our narrator into his novel, and even calls her by that name. I thought the question of how translations overwrite originals extremely interesting.
Speaking of Luka, the slow, transitory romance between the two was beautiful. Not idealistic, honestly exactly the opposite, but real and honest. My favorite moments were their interactions. I loved that we never found out if he genuinely thought her name was Natalia, or just called her that because that is the name that he used for her in his novel.
I also thought the moments reflecting on memory were well done. The subtle merging of her memories with the present throughout were very familiar and almost comforting to hear.
On the other hand, the conversations on violence in this text were very hit or miss. Some moments felt authentic and real, arising out of the narrative. While others felt preachy rather than using the story to show what she wanted to get across. I’m still not completely sure what the use of the opening scene was. I feel like understanding that was the core of understanding what the author is trying to say about violence, but it’s never explained fully.
Now, I loved the first half of the novel, but once I got to the second half, my experience went downhill. It got harder to follow the narration. The second act simply felt aimless to me. As if the author didn’t know the ending herself so she just kept going, then hit a wall and decided ‘okay that’s the end.’ The second half also got more heavy handed in its ideas, ruining the subtlety of these ideas in earlier sections of the novel.
While I think this novel wasn’t necessarily successful, I can see a lot of people enjoying the dreamlike atmosphere of this. I think even though I found the second half aimless, I loved the first half enough to check out Natalie Bakopoulo’s other novels.

Bakopoulos has a certain way with words that makes the entire book feel like a daydream. I loved the way the book was sectioned into smaller stream-of-consciousness type chunks. This provided structure to an otherwise potentially confusing narrative.
Additionally, the whole book felt fairly atmospheric. Throughout the entire novel I felt transported to Mediterranean. Midway through I looked up pictures of the Dalmatian coast and it look exactly how I was picturing it in my head. Truly wonderful writing.
Where I struggled with this book, was with the overall themes. The book had promises of something more, but it didn’t quite deliver. For example, the women who seemed to mirror what the main character did and could have been her alternates selves. Or the man on the ferry and commentary of how men treat women as they grow older. Or even exploration of our main character as she enter middle age. These were ever so gently touched upon instead of examined in detail.
My other comment, would be that I struggled to connect with the main character. I found her a bit hypocritical in her generalizations of others, and cringed at how quick she was to judge people others at a dinner party. Furthermore, while I considered her as someone with a strong viewpoint, she felt like such a bystander to her own life. I couldn’t quite understand the passivity.
While the writing itself was so wonderful to read, it could have been improved by a deeper dive into the themes promised early in the book. Overall, I feel like this book has such a strong foundation. It just needed to be built up a bit more to truly shine.

archipel
Archipelago by Natalie Bakopoulos was almost a quite incredible read, and I really hope before they publish it they can make it so. Our narrator is a literature translator who, after a weird encounter with a strange man on the ferry, arrives in Greece for a writing residency, and promptly has a casual reacquainting with a man named Luka, and enters into a rekindling of a past but dejected feeling relationship. Luka calls her by the wrong name, the name of the heroine of his novel he is writing, prompting a recognition of the two women’s uncanny resemblance; She never corrects him. We experience quite an even keeled plot of her journey through self realization over the span of what feels like a few months, and there are a lot of stand out lines and astute literary vibes presented in the meantime, the con in disguise here though being the unvarying nature of the novel, which overall lends to a feeling of indeterminate recollection when referencing back to the former content of the book itself. It all generally runs together, and at no point is their climactic moments enough to remember the impact the touching lines gave in the moment you read them, like a hit sunny day with relieving winds so timed and concise that you never truly reach scorching hot nor biting cold, a notable moment. I really do think readers who enjoy a book with a relatively flat line of an act structure, and a quiet but thoughtful read, something like The Idiot by Batuman, will I am sure enjoy this one, and generally, despite a few paltry qualms, I would be very open to giving this another try in its eventual finished state.

Archipelago by Natalie Bakopoulos is a middle age coming of age story about a woman who meets herself in a landscape not so different from her own.
The unnamed narrator, a translator, is attending a writer's residency on the Croatian coast where she encounters an old friend Luka who calls her Natalia after the character in his book. She begins to imagine herself as Natalia, freeing herself of expectation and limitation. She meets different parts of herself, thought to be long forgotten or abandoned, memories triggered by the raw beauty of the Croatian coast, reminding her of the Greece of her youth. As she translates her work, she reinterprets her own life and decides to head back to Greece where she merges with past and memory. Like an archipelago, she comes to understand her life has been a collection of experiences scattered across the vastness of time, a rugged ephemera that has translated into the totality of her being.
Poetic. Introspective. Self-reflective. The author put into words what is so hard to articulate. The transitional time of middle age, the liminality of borders between your self and perception of self. How we talk to ourselves, how we contextualize our experiences based on where we are. Reading this book was well timed for me as I have still been processing my first experience abroad and how different I was over there. In the story, everything feels familiar and yet so different for the narrator who seeks to recapture the feeling of home, a primeval state of being, free from intrusion, conditioning, and illusion.
With a dreamy prose that is both mythic and healing, Archipelago by Natalie Bakopoulos is a story I will revisit again.

Thank you to NetGalley, Natalie Bakopoulos, and Tin House Books for this arc!
“It seems appropriate I begin this story here, with a haze, a transposition, a dislocation, a movement between the borders of language and voice and home.”
Above all things, this is a novel about borders: borders between nations, between writers and translators, between how others see us and how we see ourselves, between antiquity and modernity, between memory and reality. How those connections are altered by language and shape our identities. Bakopoulos's prose is beautiful and often drifts into stream of consciousness - much in the way of Roberto Bolaño or Donna Tartt - gently steering an often amorphous plot to a cathartic conclusion.
I was moved by the quiet, transitory romance between the narrator and Luka. I was left thinking about how the trajectory of our lives shapes our capacity for vulnerability or permanence. There's something compelling about this book; I would start to think it was too meandering, and then find myself thinking all day about getting back to it.
This is not a novel I should recommend to everyone (the style might be too niche for some readers) but I'm going to do it anyway.

“Archipelago” by Natalie Bakopoulus is a dreamy, introspective novel that explores themes of identity, translation, and language. This story, reminiscent of the Odyssey, is set in Greece and follows the narrator as she returns to her family home while attending a translator's writing retreat.
The book encourages readers to consider the different roles involved in storytelling, whether as an audience, a translator, or a writer. It also examines our connections to the land and sea, as well as our relationships with both properties and other people.
Overall, this novel offers a quiet reflection on memory and engagement. I would recommend it to fans of "The Extinction of Irena Rey" by Jennifer Croft or "If an Egyptian Cannot Speak English" by Noor Naga. Many thanks to TinHouse and NetGalley for the advanced reader copy.

This is very much a book about getting lost in your identity. Going on a journey of self-discovery during an emotionally difficult part of your life and the dissection of language and how we use it to convey our feelings and identities to others.
It's whimsical in a sense that feels like a lucid dream. Natalie Bakopoulos' writing is very smooth and calming to read, the description of the world is so lush and beautiful and really transported me into the novel. Bakopoulos' ability to weave multiple narratives together is also excellent, as the novel is about a woman assuming the identity of a fictional character based on her while translating a novel at the same time--and discovering the meaning and story behind it as she translates.
Bakopoulos is certainly an author that I will be keeping an eye out for. And I'm very interested in the books that she has publish already.