In Artificial Intelligence there is the notion of model distillation, which describes how, from an initially (very) large language model (LLM), a smaller one can be shaped—one that learns to reproduce the “behavior” and the answers of the first. It is obvious that the metaphor of distillation has to do with the promise of preserving what matters, cleansed of the noise of information.
With a cinematic plot—between central Athens and the Greek suburbs west of Thessaloniki, in offices, bars and wellness centers, in SUVs and trains, in a past distant enough to forget and close enough to still feel—Giannis Balabanidis’s The Song of the Heirs seems to fulfill that promise: the distillation of an era. He writes through the eyes of his generation, generation X. One of the truly lost generations—for only the one who once had something can lose. His characters are not the people next door, yet you have surely met them. What they think, you’d wish you had thought; what they say, you’d wish had been said to you. But they do not look back, because they know that “an era ends when its illusions have ended.” Their gaze stays fixed on the present.
Yet all of the above is nothing more than a rationalization—a reading done with the mind. One could feed the book to an LLM and expect a summary of the plot, with comments on the singularity of the writing, the breadth of its references, the music, the intricate form, the rhythm and the interpolated stories. What would be missing is the craving for a whisky (a distillate, that one too), the taste of a cigarette you haven’t smoked in ten years, and the bet that cannot be lost forever.