WW2 crime mystery set in Canterbury, Kent (and London)
Talking Location With C Michelle Lindley – inspired by NAXOS
12th August 2024
TalkingLocationWith …. C Michelle Lindley, author of The Nude – inspired by NAXOS
My debut novel—The Nude—takes place on a Greek island. The story revolves around an art historian and her quest to acquire a rare, female statue. Early in the process of drafting, I knew I wouldn’t be naming the exact location in which most of the action takes place. I wanted the creative latitude, the ability to shape the details in order to paint the novel with hues of a certain mood. But if I had to pick an island that most resembles that mood, it would be Naxos.
Arriving at Naxos, in the center of the Cyclades islands, on a windy day in January, I was swept away by the vast waters, the cobblestone roads, the smell of salt. Naxos is a popular island, one of the most fruitful of the Cyclades, with blue waters and powdery sand. It is a place not without its fair share of tourists, but it is a place where the tourists are less felt. Perhaps the bounty of sites, the monuments and ruins give Naxos that feeling of untouchedness. Take the temple of Apollo. In the 6th century BC, Lygdamis sought to create a grand, one-of-a-kind temple, but its construction was interrupted by a war between Naxos and Samos. Now, all that’s left is the Portara, also known as the Great Door. Standing before it, with the wind coming in from the sea, feels nothing short of Orphic.
Elsewhere on Naxos, you can find the prototypical cobblestone roads, the white buildings, and small shops. Narrow, labyrinthine lanes. Fruit and vegetable stands, brimming with color. And potatoes. Rich, buttery potatoes, drowning in local olive oil. Herodotus impressed Naxos as the most fortunate of all the islands and I think it has something to do with the potatoes.
It was important that I try to find some small museum while in Naxos and happened upon The Archeological Museum of Naxos, which served as vital inspiration for the book. A brochure featuring one of these Spedos figurines even made it into the novel. (There was something about the figurines that stayed with me. Perhaps it is their lack of eyes, the withdrawnness of their wrapped arms).
There were many statues I found inspiration in. When 
writing The Nude’s main character, Elizabeth, I felt pulled to the idea of a woman who was aware of her sexuality and its ability to serve her, and also completely burdened and overwhelmed by it, paralyzed at the thought of engaging, and also at the thought of not engaging. As an appraiser of art, of beauty, Elizabeth is attuned—hyper-attuned—to the “feminine ideal” (hard to not put quotations around such a phrase, since it is so frangible, so dubious) and still, though she may resent such ideals, and what they say about her, she bends to them, treats them as a kind of God. Figures, such as these two, the first found in Santorini, the second in Naxos, kept such dichotomies in the forefront of my mind:
On the recommendation of a local, I rented a car and drove up the mountains of Naxos, an exhilarating and quick way to get a sense of the terrain—the olive groves, and shady plane trees. The ancient stone walls. I parked off a side street in Apiranthos and walked around. I bought honey and tea at a local shop—the honey made somewhere close by. (A honey farm does exist in the world of The Nude, but I wasn’t able to find such a place.) The village of Apiranthos rests on the incline of the lush Mount Fanari, located 600 meters from sea level, transporting you almost fully away from the scene of Naxos’s golden beaches. Since the 1700s, after a war with the Turks, Cretans fled to Apiranthos, and to this day, retain their own dialect, their own ecosystem separate from the rest of the island. (Apparently, Zeus’ childhood cave is located somewhere close by, but I didn’t get the chance to seek it.)
Back in Athens, an important scene in The Nude takes place at the Acropolis. Because the Acropolis is such a well 
traversed location, I wanted to defamiliarize it, to disarm the reader of its knowability, and capture the vertiginous feeling of being up at the citadel, overlooking the city in all its grandeur. Some construction was going on during this time, the blending of the new and old, which made me question what it means, to try and hold the past in the present, or perhaps, the present in the past. I thought about that question often, as I drafted the scene. It’s one that continued to haunt the entire novel. In some ways, it is the question at the very heart of it.
C Michelle Lindley is the author of The Nude published by VERVE Books.
Join team TripFiction on Social Media:
Twitter (@TripFiction), Facebook (@TripFiction.Literarywanderlust), YouTube (TripFiction #Literarywanderlust), Instagram (@TripFiction) and Pinterest (@TripFiction) and BlueSky(tripfiction.bsky.social) and Threads (@tripfiction)
Please wait...
