Coming of age is a universal experience. At least nowadays it is. Adolescence as a distinct stage of life between childhood and adulthood, with its own culture, activities, rituals, products and angst, is a modern invention. Before that children were just little people growing slowly into big people.
But we need not go too far into the past to find out how much things have changed from one generation to the next, how different the expectations, behaviors and preoccupations of young people are today. Many of these differences have to do with larger societal changes. Kiki Denis's novel, The Last Day of Paradise, is a coming of age story spanning three generations in small-town Greece, narrated by fifteen-year-old Sunday. Her narrative not only captures how much things have changed since her grandparents' time, but also how much their actions, decisions, and experiences are carried over to affect her generation.
The Last Day of Paradise is Kiki Denis's debut novel. Born in Greece, she came to the United States in 1990 to pursue her BA in philosophy and economics at Mount Holyoke College on a full scholarship. She then went to Exeter, England to complete an MA in psychology before settling in New York City in 1997. There she began writing short stories, poetry, and this novel. She is currently working on her second novel, Noble Silence, and a poetry collection entitled The Cycle of Consciousness.
The language of The Last Day of Paradise is unique - sometimes funny, often jarring and disconcerting. Sometimes writers who choose to write in their second language are particularly good at capturing the voice of a second language learner. Denis tries to do that in this novel with Sunday. Just a few pages in, Sunday says that she is sure by now "you got a feeling that the language I am using here is not my mother/first tongue." She uses Greek during the day and English at night. And just in case the reader finds something weird about her use of language, she says: "'cause of this overworking situation, I may often use your language irrationally, inappropriately, over-loosely, but please spare the sweat..."
It's difficult to say whether Sunday's voice fails to convince because the second language aspect is not captured successfully, or because the author simultaneously attempts to capture teen-speak. The teen-speak is at times convincing, capturing the raw cynicism of modern Greek teen culture. I suspect it is the combination that proves ultimately too much for Denis to manage with consistency.
What's nice about the use of English in this novel is that it is not just Kiki Denis choosing to write a Greek story in English for the benefit of anglophone readers. Rather, it is written in English because Sunday, the young narrator of the story, likes to use English with her friends and chooses also to write about her experiences in English. Sunday and her clique use English as a sort of code language amongst themselves, a language most of the adults don't understand.
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