by Kelly Pedro
April , 2023
Kelly Pedro’s fiction has appeared in PRISM, The New Quarterly and Cleaver, and is forthcoming in Archetype Literary and New Flash Fiction Review. Her work has also been shortlisted for Room’s 2022 fiction contest. Find her on Twitter at @KellyPatLarge.
Until All You See Is Sky by George Choundas; EastOver Press LLC; 188 pages; $20.00
George Choundas’ essay collection, Until All You See Is Sky, reads as a map of his life as a father, son, first generation American, and former FBI agent with a keen eye for detail. This is Choundas’ third book and follows the short story collection The Making Sense of Things, which won the Ronald Sukenick Innovative Fiction Prize, and was shortlisted for the Robert C. Jones Prize for Short Prose, the St. Lawrence Book Award for Fiction, and the Katherine Anne Porter Prize in Short Fiction. He also wrote The Pirate Primer: Master the Language of Swashbucklers and Rogues, which serves as a manual for understanding the pirate language. Weaving together a strong sense of place, Choundas uses the thirteen essays in Until All You See Is Sky to write about perseverance, deftly magnifying the small moments in life to explore shifting identities and what it means to belong as a first generation American.
Choundas’ short story collection, The Making Sense of Things, was praised for containing “stories within stories” and he’s done the same with the opening essay, “Paylessness.” On the surface, this is an essay about a boy getting his first pair of brand name shoes. But within that is a story that captures the moment Choundas, who is half Greek and half Cuban, crosses the threshold of belonging as a first-generation American. The essay is built around a Payless shoe store and Choundas expertly crafts a rich setting of a long street in Tampa that holds two realities: One end of the street is a swanky neighborhood, the other dead ends at the sodium lights of a Payless shoe store where his mother stretched their family’s meagre budget. Choundas is nine when his family moves from New Jersey to Tampa, where he attends a private school on a scholarship. He wasn’t bullied at the school but became acutely aware of the family’s lack of wealth. It was here he realized that unlike other families at the school, his didn’t jet set on vacation, he wasn’t enrolled in cotillion classes, and his shoes were made of plastic and not genuine leather. But both he and his parents aspired for something more—Choundas, a sense of belonging in the privileged world his peers inhabited, and his parents, a desire for upward mobility. Halfway through the decade, the family’s fortune changed. His parents got stable jobs and that meant his mother bought him a pair of brand name shoes at a department store in a Tampa mall. The essay is not just about the simple act of buying shoes, but about the belonging that came with the “bridging of opposite worlds.” It’s a voice-driven essay that feels intimate, funny, and touching, and solidifies Choundas’ ability as a storyteller.
Choundas’ essays often balance wit with aching truths so that as a reader there is a sense of surprise with each essay—it’s not clear which emotion he will twist forward and so the reader enters each essay ready for the adventure that awaits. The strength of the collection rests with Choundas’ ability to find adventure and wit inside the small moments of life. As a whole, the collection is set up much like those small moments of life Choundas is so good at magnifying. There are longer essays that touch on the collection’s central themes of belonging and perseverance and shorter essays that felt more like intercessions to help readers digest the essay they just read before diving into the next one. An example of this is “The Petervian Calendar,” a short lament of how quickly time passes for parents largely centered around Choundas’ time with his son. While a sweet accounting of their adventures together, there was perhaps a missed opportunity to more firmly connect this essay to the collection’s broader theme of belonging and more deeply reflect on how his son’s sense of belonging is different from his own as a first generation American.
Throughout the collection, Choundas has a way of weaving stories that start at one place, amble along, then end at a totally different place where the ending feels surprising but inevitable. It’s clear that he’s untangling shifting identities both in his own life and in the structure that the essays themselves take. Choundas explores his shifting identity of what it means to be Greek in “The Vengeances.” The essay starts at an unexpected place: With Paris stealing Helen and whisking her to Troy. From there, Choundas recounts both the humorous and heart wrenching history between Greece and Italy where the countries were at war in the 1940s, each country always on high alert and taking losses until near the end of the decade when both settled into a kind of peace that came with compromise. It’s here that the essay’s identity shifts: It’s no longer a story about war, but a story about love. A few years after the war ended, Choundas’ father worked on a cargo shuttle that travelled between Greece and Italy. The ship carried stones one way and hay the other as part of a trade between the two countries. His father was so taken with Italy that he kept working on a ship longer than expected and almost forgot who he was: A man with a dream of immigrating to America. But, Choundas continues, the stories his father shared are not about the rivalry between the two countries. “Whenever my father tells them, I see two countries, one as war-broken and impoverished as the other, trading rocks and grass between them. Each offers the other what it can: parts of itself.” In exploring his father’s stories about growing up in Greece and falling in love with Italy while travelling aboard a cargo ship, Choundas is also exploring his own shifting identity as someone who is part Greek and married a Roman Catholic. In Until All You See Is Sky, Choundas offers us the same stories his father offered him: fragments of his own life, rendered in a beautiful, generous, and humorous way so that we may understand the risks life demands of us to keep on living.
Until All You See Is Sky blends humor and insight as it explores belonging and perseverance and the shifting identities that come with immigration. By sharing fragments of his own life, Choundas magnifies what it means to be human, and the fearlessness needed to pursue our own dreams in a richly rendered world, whether that world is in a Payless shoe store, a luxury hotel in Boston, or on a trading ship making regular journeys between Italy and Greece.
Throughout it all, Choundas is a steady guide, inviting readers into his world so we may also see the humor, resilience, and persistence that life requires.
©2023 West Trade Review
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Exploring Shifting Identities in George Choundas' Until All You See Is Sky
NONFICTION REVIEW
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