The Daughter

Pavlos Matesis’s historical fiction The Daughter (1990), translated by Fred A. Reed, follows a young Greek girl living in occupied Greece in the final years of World War II. The main character, Roubini, reflects on her childhood during the occupation, and the rapid loss of innocence she experienced watching her mother, Asimina, try to save her children from starvation. The novel then follows Roubini through her life as an aspiring actor, ending as 65-year-old Roubini looks back on her life and the horrors and beauties she witnessed.

The novel opens in 1943. The narrator, Roubini, a sixty-five-year-old actor looks back on her childhood during the formative years of World War II. Greek, she lives in a small rural village she calls “Rampartville” with her siblings and her young mother, Asimina. Her father, a soldier, has not returned from the line of duty. Asimina assumes that her husband was killed many months ago on the Albanian front.

During World War II, Greece is split up and controlled by Germany, Italy, and Bulgaria. At various points, Roubini interacts with German and Italian soldiers, who treat her people like animals. The level of deprivation the Greeks experience during this period is horrifying—many people die of starvation, and parents struggle to find enough food to keep their children alive. Roubini recalls watching as her brother is brutally maimed by a German soldier. Her brother, who was “ungainly as a plucked chicken” tries to steal three potatoes for the family and is caught by a German soldier. Roubini and her mother watch, horrified, as the German soldier smiles at the boy, and then brings his rifle butt down hard on his hand. Without access to medical care, his hand never works again.



Roubini describes a formative moment, in which she believes she lost her childhood innocence. She carries a girl dying of consumption to the sea, so she can have a look at the ocean. It is her first and last image of the sea, and Roubini realizes at that moment that no one will praise her actions. No one helps her, no one else cares. She loses her innocence that day, and her view of the world changes.

Much of the drama during this period of Roubini's life centers on her relationship with her mother. Asimina struggles to feed her children, unprotected with her husband dead and lost in Albania. To survive, she makes the difficult choice to invite Italian soldiers to have sex with her and to live in her home. In the small town where they live, everyone knows what Asimina is up to. While some are forgiving of her actions, understanding that she is trying to save her children from harm and starvation, many label her a whore and a traitor.

After the liberation of Greece, no one forgets what Asimina did. Her reputation and the brutal treatment she receives from her neighbors for sleeping with the enemy nearly destroy both Asimina and Roubini's lives. Under the shadow of this childhood and adolescence, Roubini decides to become an actor. However, her passion is neither simple nor without consequences—for much of the rest of the book, she examines the results of her choices and the twists in her life that brought her, finally, to her retirement years.



Matesis, a Greek writer, playwright, and translator, was born in Divri in 1933 and died in 2013. During his prolific career as a writer, he taught drama in Athens, worked for the National Theatre, and wrote the scripts for two television shows that were broadcast on the state-run channel in Greece. He wrote more than twelve original plays and translated the works of famous playwrights, including Shakespeare, Pinter, Artaud, and Faulkner. The Daughter (2002) was his last novel and his first work to bring him acclaim outside of Greece.