The Woman of Andros
A novella by Thornton Wilder.

“He’s a young man who knows what he means to do. I will not coerce him,” says Simo, the father of the young man in question, to his friend Chremes. Chremes is upset. He and his wife can’t understand why Simo’s son is delaying marriage to their daughter Philumena. The reason, we soon learn, is the Woman of Andros.

Simo and Chremes live on the small Greek island of Brynos. The woman of the story’s title is from the island of Andros ; a foreigner, therefore. Moreover, she gives herself airs. All the young men of Brynos get invited to her table for an authentic symposium. Sometimes she lets one of her guests stay the night. The older generation does not appreciate the presence of the Andrian woman on their island. She’s disrupting everyone’s life with her foreign ways.

In this vaguely haunting novella or extended short story -- I read it in one sitting, between midnight and three-thirty in the morning -- Wilder describes the inner lives of several endearing characters. At first, life on Brynos appears pretty straight-forward to each of the protagonists. But thanks to the Woman of Andros, each character’s certainties about life on the island are challenged. The problem appears to be that human beings, with few exceptions, “merely endure the slow misery of existence, hiding as best they can their consternation that life has no wonderful surprises after all and that its most difficult burden is the incommunicability of love.” Will each character succeed in making his or her life worth living ? That is the question one keeps asking until the very end.

Wilder’s tale is based on the Andria, a comical play by the Roman playwright Terence who in turn based his work on two Greek plays by Menander, now lost. It’s just as well that Wilder did not exceed 23,000 words with this work, a best-seller when it was published in 1930. I could read it a second, even a third time, I believe, and no reading experience would exactly resemble any previous one. It’s one of those works where knowing what happens at the end doesn’t spoil the fascination of discovering the fragility of each character’s -- and no doubt our own -- deepest and most secret feelings.