Sea of Many Returns: 9 Compact Discs, 9.5 Hours

by Arnold Zable, James Wright

In Sea of Many Returns, master storyteller Arnold Zable delivers a cavalcade of stories, characters and places. He takes us to the island of Ithaca, the Ionian Sea, Kalgoorlie and Melbourne, as well as Port Said, the Black Sea and Danube River ports.

Mentor leaves Ithaca in 1916, a young man, and arrives in Kalgoorlie. But race riots soon see him on another journey, this time to Melbourne. Nearly ninety years later, Mentor's Melbourne-born granddaughter Xanthe is translating Mentor's manuscript, and making her own journey - back to Ithaca. Through Mentor's manuscript and Xanthe's memories, we meet many people and hear their stories, spanning more than a century. Like Homer's Odysseus, they left Ithaca to journey to distant places.

We follow the lives of two brothers, who, as teenagers in the 1930s, build a boat and ferry freight and passengers across the Ionian Sea until one brother leaves for Australia. We meet Antonios Lekatsas and learn of his partnership with architect Walter Burley Griffin to design some of Melbourne's most creative buildings. And we hear the stories of the women who waited on Ithaca while their men sought fortune in Australia.

Sea of Many Returns is a moving novel exploring the immigrant experience and our connections with place and those we love.

Genres: Literature, Fiction

Audio CD

First published January 1, 2008

About the author

Zable was born on 10 January 1947 in Wellington, New Zealand to Polish-Jewish refugee parents. They moved early in his life to Australia and he grew up in Carlton, Victoria.

Zable is known as a storyteller - through his memoirs, short stories and novels. Australian critic Susan Varga says that Zable's award-winning memoir, Jewels and Ashes, "was a ground-breaking book in Australia, one of the first of what has since become a distinct auto/biographical genre: a second-generation writer returns to the scene of unspeakable crimes to try to understand a fraught and complex legacy, and, in so doing, embarks on a journey into the self.

In an interview Zable explained that the rights and experiences of refugees and asylum seekers underpins his work:

"The current generation of refugees are experiencing the intense challenges faced by previous generations. We tend to forget, or fail to imagine, how difficult it is to start life anew far from the homeland. We forget also that nostalgia, the longing for the return to homeland, is a deep and enduring aspect of the refugee experience."

In the same interview he said about his language that "I am drawn to the quirky sayings and observations that define a person or a culture".

Reviews

[Jim KABLE · Rating 5 out of 5]

From There and Back - Repeat Many Times

I am the grandson of immigrants from the other side of the world. I grew up alongside immigrants and the descendants of immigrants from Asia and Europe. At Sydney University I read closely, under the direction of Leonie Kramer, two novels which gave me a closer Anglo-cultural understanding of the immigrant experience - nearly 40 years ago - Martin Boyd’s The Cardboard Crown and Shirley Hazzard’s The Transit of Venus. I was already making voyages to connect with the families of my maternal grand-father and of my paternal grand-mother. Who was I - how was it that I was “Australian” - a land stolen in the late 18th century from its First Nations peoples by invaders among whom my ancestors. Greece is the first country I set foot on in Europe - it has a special meaning. And on that first visit I took a ferry from Patras past the Ionian Islands central to this story to Corfu - then on to Brindisi in Italy. Years later in Japan I became friendly with the great grand-son of a man born on Lefkada - the great writer Lafcadio Hearn (named for the island). This is a beautiful tale - and terrible, too - told by a master story-teller - Arnold Zable. I recommend it most highly to anyone who has felt that immigrant pull or tug back-and-forth of nostalgia of both points.

[Genevieve · Rating 4 out of 5]

The ability of the author to describe the feelings of so many overlapping characters was the main strength of this book for me and the unusual chronology of the story kept me interested.
Zable all the sailors (men) from Ithaca to Odysseus, all the male story tellers to Homer and to a degree all the women who stayed behind to Penelope. This gave the novel a feeling that life as an Ithican was predestined and to a degree inevitable. Some of the men who immigrated to Australia were unable to break the mould.

[Georgy Hadwen · Rating 4 out of 5]

I was surprised to find this gentle exploration of diaspora and the choices made in leaving ones homeland made it a pleasant and thought provoking read. Knowing the author was not Greek I was prepared to be disappointed but he seemed to have absorbed the notion of Greekness and those tragedies that they seem best at. Some of the plot lines were less credible to fit into the changing world outside but the core idea of yearning for ones homeland at some level resonated with me as a migrant who did not do so until the identity of my birth place had been irrevocably imprinted. The family whose patriarch loses his son through abandoning him and then watches him disown him was well drawn with Xanthe coming "home " so to speak with her daughter to fit the pieces of her familial jigsaw together. There was enough history , enough classical story line and enough plot to make this a book to be recommended for those quieter times

[Lynn · Rating 1 out of 5]

Yawn. Did anything interesting happen in this book? What was the point, really? I think I missed something.