Mireille Juchau: a note on Fiction by Antigone Kefala

Read an excerpt from Mireille Juchau’s introduction to Fiction (April 2025), a commemorative edition collecting novellas, short stories and more by Antigone Kefala.

A recent claim about art’s beneficial properties suggests that the artist’s experience of exile forges works of wisdom, ethical purity, special insight. Antigone Kefala’s austere and radiant fiction splinters this totalising vision. Her searching narrators describe exile’s irredeemable complexity, how loss of language and culture undoes and remakes the self. Throughout Kefala’s distinctive project, the individual contends with longing, thwarted creativity and fate. Everyone needs something to protect them from ‘a direct contact with life’, says one of her characters in The First Journey. ‘If he does not have faith, which is the best protection, then he invents something else, imitates, takes a vice.’ 

Kefala’s protagonists are alert to received wisdoms, banalities, cant. They enfold us instead in shared existential experience. In the novella Intimacies, Helen dissects private and public customs. At work, she takes a lift with a Tasmanian accountant. A man ‘frozen some millenniums ago…and now being defrosted by the office’, he hasn’t yet reached ‘human consistency’. In Conversations with Mother, the second-person ‘you’ addresses a trinity – narrator, reader, and the mother who has died. The dead, or frozen in time, take modern and mythical forms in Kefala’s heightened yet spare realism. The living are not so much haunted as animated by their dead, still ventriloquising their longings and regrets. In all her work the past is both void and guide.

…

Reading backward, or so I’ve come to think of my reading from Late Journals to the earliest novella – is to encounter Kefala’s striking, authoritative voice as it was honed through exile from a war-ruined Europe, Soviet-occupied Romania and the southern countries that became her home. None of her works of decreation can morally purify the reader, since that is the job of homilies. Kefala doesn’t aim to comfort. Still, I’m consoled by her exhilarating attention to life’s contradictions, and the ceaseless mystery of ourselves.