Olga... Olga... Where are you?

"No one writes for eternity anymore, simply because eternity no longer exists!" Olga told him one day, looking at him with her light green, penetrating, hungry eyes. She had a warm, curious, bewitched, and compassionate gaze. For her, our time was—is—"the antechamber of barbarism," in which only one value rules: selling a lot, earning a lot. Money as the measure of all that is human.

In his new novel, as autobiographical as many of the author's others, Theodor Kallifatides cries and laughs with a friend, Olga, his best friend, who has been diagnosed with lung cancer. With his usual noble and poetic common sense, he makes us part of a beautiful relationship, one of those in which words are like caresses. Remembering and accompanying Olga, A woman to love (Galaxia Gutenberg), we enter the inner world of an older man who also makes himself lovable. Someone who thinks and doubts out loud, who gives meaning and sensitivity to his prosaic reality, and to ours.

"True freedom is not, as we believe, in living as we want, but in not preventing others from living as they want." Giving space and freedom to children, immigrants, neighbors, friends—it's hard, yes. Right now, we live in times of intolerance: if you are not and think and behave as I want, you are my enemy; I will force you to be like me or I will expel you, I will destroy you. In Sweden, throughout Europe and beyond, young Kallifatides would have a terrible time today, he would come up against a wall of incomprehension and suspicion. He would be seen as an outsider who came to take advantage.

The young Kallifatides, an immigrant in Sweden in the 1960s, was a communist. After meeting Olga, he fell in love with Gunilla, a liberal Swedish woman, a rare breed in those days. Gunilla would end up being his partner, to this day. Little by little, he shed his ideological convictions, not without effort: "Erroneous opinions often have a sentimental weight that true ones lack." He also decided to adopt Swedish as his literary language, another great effort.

Now, decades later, it's as if his roots are growing up his trunk. "After 38 years in Sweden, after more than 30 books in Swedish, Greek is, nevertheless, my language." "It's like meeting someone you fell in love with a long time ago and finally understanding why," he says. And he reflects: "One cannot abandon one's own life. And yet, this is what I have dedicated most of my life to doing. I left Greece; then I left my language [...] Why have I had, and always have, the need to leave everything behind? What mirage is there on the other side?" Gunilla and the children are his life. They are Sweden. Olga is half Greek, half Swedish. The mother who lives in Athens is Greece. Three women, three intimate realities that accompany him.

From the island of Gotland, his summer refuge, he learns that Olga has taken a turn for the worse. The imminent loss of his friend makes him understand that Gotland is no longer the genuine place he knew in 1972. It has become a lost paradise. "To have been born as a human being is to have lost paradise [...] Why does a human being need that loss?" Will Olga, too, become a lost paradise? With her, he learned that "friendship is much more demanding than love." "When I was little, I snotted a lot," and now that he's older, he sheds "a lot of tears." "If you have big dreams when you're young, you'll cry a lot when you're older." But he's clear that "you can't start furnishing homesickness because then you run the risk of feeling at home." That's why he doesn't own any property in Greece, not even a window.

One day, also long ago, the university professor at the Faculty of Philosophy who was annoying him, in an informal conversation, said that people were strange, and he, Kallifatides, replied: "The strange thing is that people aren't stranger." Years later, the man sent him a letter in which he said he'd been thinking about it and that, indeed, he was right. A strange gesture that confirms that we all are, strange as can be. Olga: strong and determined, and yet tender and sensitive; passionate but seemingly cold. Kallifatides, a very Greek Swede, a somewhat libertarian social democrat. A man to love.