Aristo's Family [Kindle Edition]

The opening chapters offered no Big Bang sensation and yet, strangely, I was hooked early, partly by the dry humour in which the author dips Mr Spiropoulos, the education inspector and some of the Cypriot villagers, but mainly because of the feeling that, like the teenage Pavlos who is hypnotised by his father, Aristo, I too was gradually sinking alongside the character into the trances, which Aristo describes as the 'Greek lessons' for his boy.
Aristo wants to convince his son there is a wider family, even though the authorities have informed him that his family were burnt beyond recognition when the Turks invaded Cyprus. The strangeness of the act, hypnotising one's own son, made me read on to find out whether Aristo was really as unloving as the sessions would suggest or whether he was just a desperately lonely and obsessed man. Pavlos craves to be closer to his Dad but when the weird family take on an ancient connection up in the deserted Troodos mountains at night, I feared for the son and wondered whether either father or son would ever draw closer or further apart. Only quibble - would have liked this to stretch nearer to 300 pages than the 240, though the writing is otherwise a gem, particularly when it observes the weird museum colleagues of Aristo and when, perhaps most of all, Pavlos turns for solace to the mature, charming Katherine, another colleague of his father's and into whose charms he ultimately sinks.

I have started this book but just could not get into it at all. It seemed unite depressing at times rather dark. Not my kind of story. I may go back to it again at some time but not just yet.

Pavlos yearns to mean more to his father, archaeologist and private museum owner Aristo, who has started to drive up through the winding roads of the Troodos mountains of Cyprus at night, alone, obsessed, almost afflicted, in search of traces of his family who, his father cannot accept, were all burnt and left unidentifiable after the Turkish invasion of the island in 1974. Even when he returns home to his son, Aristo seems increasingly distant, not just preoccupied, but almost as if possessed by people he claims to have met up in mountain dwellings and yet who seem to Pavlos increasingly to betray some strangely ancient habits.
When Pavlos awakens to the realisation that he can hypnotise his father then, once in trance, he witnesses his father beginning to utter things which reveal a link to a Greek Cypriot family who once lived millennia ago. They are returning, so his hypnotised father reveals, to "make his son clean" after Aristo found his teenage boy beneath his beautiful middle-aged archaeologist colleague, Katharine.
In places you have to suspend disbelief and though, at times, the story takes on the flavour of a Greek myth, it is true to say Aristo's Family is more rooted in the realities of modern Cyprus. So for me it was, more than anything else, a portrayal of a one parent family of father and son - remote from one another in the normal emotional sense of family, and not knowing whether they would ever become close.