ONE BOAT

A woman’s two visits to a Greek town, to mourn the deaths of her parents, open up questions of memory, immediacy, and selfhood.

British writer Buckley’s latest, long-listed for the Booker Prize, is a short, teasing, shape-shifter of a novel focused on Teresa, an Englishwoman with a special affection for this unnamed Greek coastal settlement. Nine years earlier she had come here to put her thoughts in order—“This place was conducive to introspection”—following her mother’s death. While fending off calls from her ex-husband, exploring and admiring the landscape, befriending a waitress and a poetically inclined car mechanic, and having an affair with a diving instructor, she kept notes that both recorded and refracted the experience. On the second visit, after her father’s death, she reconnects with these locals and others, their lives having moved on, as has her own. Buckley seems in no hurry to reveal character, place, or explanation, meanwhile offering minutely observed shifts in tone or perception: “A faint grain in the air of the bay, I wrote in the notebook. Quivering water, mild light.” Slowly Teresa’s identity emerges—she’s closer to her mother (a brilliant mathematician) than her father, “handsome,” “blunt,” “a perfectionist,” “suboptimally passionate.” A legal professional, she was “born to be a champion of the law,” someone who never avoided an argument. Her experiences, recollections, decisions, encounters, and philosophical musings are both narrated and lent scrutiny in her notebooks, the style lending a layering, echoing effect. Buckley’s brief, deft narrative, while not especially strong on plot development, is both rooted in place and vastly searching, touching on history, literature, and philosophy, as well as crime and violence. It offers moments of lingering intensity. And then the story takes another turn, giving rise to meta questions about all that has gone before.

Explorations of connection and presence drive this enigmatic, precise little web of a book.