Greece Travel Blog

No one else’s behavior makes any sense, according to the very first sentence in Barbara Bonfigli’s, Cafe Tempest – a book with “adventures on a small Greek island”, a “fictional memoir”.

But, how can ourselves make some sense, even to us only, if everybody else is beyond understanding? Or: are we that different, each of us a completely different and strange species!, unable to know anything whatever about the others just by knowing our own behavior? Barbara goes on immediately to confess that she has given up all her struggle for meaning. This ‘disappointment’ came after her thinking on a scout pledge, to love “especially those at home”, – a sappy and rambling ending, as she calls it.

The book is full of similar touches upon thoughts, without elaboration, without even some hints to their understanding, thoughts one can explore or not toward whatever interpretation according to one’s own nature. Nothing becomes a “big matter”, everything is seen from a detouched point of view.

In Barbara’s book Greece is almost a background and environment (the cafe) to a mild intellectual tempest, – a land that contributes with mildness in a series of questions and remarks of a person’s ‘pursuing’ a better understanding of oneself, in reality traveling not so much to Greece but between yoga and writing. Of course, the ‘background’ is not indifferent, it exists because the author enjoys it, sharing this joy, and it is mainly the everyday life, itself a product of a long time.., a no less-Greek product than literature or the arts.

Barbara admits that “I’ve found my native land. The days are mild, the water warm, the sky an unfiltered blue”. This nature includes the people, who are “by nature generous and embracing” – a surprising friendly land, especially when you speak the language Greeks are very proud of: “any visitor who makes the slightest attempt to speak their impossible language is practically adopted.”

This way Barbara overcomes the opening sentence of the book, arriving where understanding becomes more possible – even if one doesn’t know the impossible language…

You can read the book focusing to the background, trying to distill a feeling of being in a Greek island (even the blue of the cover with a port drawing will help you on this), and you can also participate in the author’s intellectual exercises – if you take your time on thoughts made and passed rapid fast…

Cf. Barbara Bonfigli’s, Cafe Tempest – Adventures on a small Greek island (A fictional memoir) – at Amazon

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