Sophocles’s Antigone is a battle over the burial of a body and the war between law and divinity. What rules – the decree of a king or conscience? This is the crux of Sofka Zinovieff’s Stealing Dad.
When Alekos, a Greek sculptor, is struck down in 2018 by a heart attack and drowns in a London canal, he leaves behind not just a spiky widow, Heather, but seven children and five colourful ex-wives. The children find it hard to imagine that his death could be so mundane: more fitting would have been ‘swimming the Hellespont or shredded by sharks’.
Alekos is a ‘Zorba-like figure’ whose selfishness has caused chaos: ‘the human collateral damage consisted of furious women, abandoned offspring and wounded spirits’. When Heather refuses to let the family attend his funeral, the children, suffering from ‘death-lag’, gather to plot a coup. What follows is part grief-memoir and part macabre escapade.
Zinovieff has written a work of fiction inspired by her own parent’s death: ‘My father left a note requesting that only his widow attend his cremation and my siblings and I were prevented from going to the funeral.’ The crematorium caper of Stealing Dad is overstuffed with a large cast of characters and threads of adultery, depression, IVF, suicide and alcoholism. A longer novel might have framed the story more believably. But the writing is fresh –‘the iced dive of vodka’, ‘perfect fingernails like peeled almonds’ – and sensuous: ‘Above them, a bat made elliptical laps in the warm, orange-tinted darkness.’
The author weaves in some valuable ideas: how selfish parenting can pass on ‘destructive impulses’ and the theory of ‘psychoneuroimmunology’– that ‘bereavement can cause heart disease or diabetes’.
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