Eat, Drink and be Married (by Eve Makis)

(Amazon UK link)

I hadn’t heard of Eve Makis, but her book ‘Eat, Drink and be Married’ looked appealing when I saw it on a church bookstall… nearly five years ago. It evidently wasn’t appealing enough for me to read it before now, but I’m working through my unread books, and finally picked it up to read a few days ago.

The story is told in the first person, from the perspective of a teenager called Anna. She’s the daughter of Greek Cypriot parents who own a fish and chip shop in the UK. Anna is quite academic and longs to go to university at some point, but her mother is very traditional. She wants Anna to find a nice Cypriot young man, get married, and have babies.

Anna has an older brother, Andy, who gets rather more freedom than she does. She refers to her parents by their first names - Tony and Tina - but is closest to her grandmother, referred to as Yiayia, the Greek word for Grandma. Her mother has two sisters who live not far away, both married, both with daughters around Anna’s age. But whereas she mostly gets along with her cousin Maria, she finds her cousin Athena very difficult. Athena’s father is British rather than Cypriot, and Anna’s mother does not approve.

It’s a book of small incidents, mostly, with some historical background. We learn how and why the family has ended up in the UK, when their hearts and souls (at least, those of the older generations) still long to be in Cyprus. Since I live in Cyprus and know some of the history, it was very interesting to read it in novel form, fleshing out a lot of details I only knew of vaguely. 

There are several references to food, unsurprisingly. Anyone familiar with Mediterranean-style hospitality will recognise that Tina’s insistence on cooking and entertaining is entirely realistic. Apparently the author of the book grew up in the UK, the daughter of Cypriot parents, so I expect that a lot of the stories and background are from her own experience. They certainly feel authentic, if a tad caricatured at times.

The story is character-based, on the whole. It shows the racism and violence that some ex-pat shop and restaurant owners experienced - and probably still do. And it also shows how easy it is for people in some cultures to ‘bend’ or ‘twist’ the truth to suit themselves… even when I entirely sympathised, I didn’t feel entirely comfortable with that, or the quick spurts of anger that come to some of the main characters, as well as the minor, racist ones. 

There’s some low-key humour, in the inevitable exaggerations and some of the interactions, and some Greek dialogue, always in Latin letters and with translations immediately below. I liked the way that Tina could be extremely rude to her customers in Greek, in a polite voice; I was also amused at some of her malapropisms. Despite having lived in the UK for so long, amongst mostly mono-lingual people, her English is stilted, with many errors that made me smile. 

There’s not a great deal of plot. Anna’s observations are wry, although at times feel rather more mature than a girl in her mid-teens. She knows she’s a bit of a misfit; she doesn’t want to go along with her family’s traditional take on a woman’s role, but she also doesn’t want to assimilate into an all-British teenager like her cousin Athena. She loves her parents - and extended family - very much, but desperately wants to follow her own dreams, and, eventually, find a young man herself rather than having him selected by her mother and aunts.

On the whole I did like the book, although I’m sure that a lot of the enjoyment was because I know people in this culture, and am aware of Cypriot and Middle Eastern tendencies. But I don’t know that I’ll read it again. 

Recommended in a low-key way if you’d like something a bit different that’s light-hearted on the whole, but with a few shocking scenes and a bittersweet ending. 

 

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