Unnamed narrators are no strangers in fiction, but I can’t recall a time when a narrator was misnamed and more or less went along with it. That is, until I read Natalie Bakopoulos’s Archipelago, a novel in which a woman comes unmoored from herself in a slippery odyssey of identity, borders, and language.
Before she is misnamed, the narrator of Archipelago has a moment of misrecognition on a boat taking her to a writing residency on the Dalmatian coast. A man glares at her, and his invasive act results not in his own realization of wrongdoing but in the narrator’s dislocation from herself: “I met his eyes a moment and hoped he’d understand that I was not who he thought. I was someone else.” But who that someone else is she does not say, only that she is otherwise and perhaps cannot—or will not—articulate the borders of her being beyond that.
At the residency, the narrator encounters Luka, an old friend, who calls her Natalia, a name that is not hers. He remembers details of their yearslong friendship, but he misnames her after the protagonist of his book, a character who bears a resemblance to her. As with the man on the boat, the narrator stands before a mystery: “I did not deny, I did not correct him; I had allowed for the merging of character and self and maybe I’d even craved it.” Far from frightened at her unmooring, the narrator’s delight in being other allows her to become “another self in another reality, cast out to tell another story.”
Like Odysseus, the narrator is at sea in a grand adventure, but in Archipelago the fact of her femaleness and aging body changes the course of the journey. Here, the narrator is not returning from war but entering her so-called middle ages, the prolonged homecoming one of rediscovering herself:
I had been conditioned to think that menopause would be an end, but it was a reset. A beginning of a story that starts in the middle. The word ‘pause’ implies ‘to be continued.’ I had entered a story in its middle. I did not feel like a dried-out husk of myself or that I was slowly disappearing but instead like I’d become part of a larger space, a larger feeling, as if the boundaries of my self had opened up. I no longer needed to assert a self, or forgo one. Something else.
In this way, the narrator is in a process of renaming herself, or allowing that there is no name for what she is experiencing, an unmarked territory that needs no staked flag. Amongst the archipelagoes that surround her, she muses on how borders of self and nations create rigidity where porousness should reign. “Not the creation of a story but its decreation,” she asserts. “A self you unravel to its ante-self, an allowance of opacity, and then put back together again and hope the filigree patches of gold make it glow.”
Through these reflections the narrator understands her own role as a translator to be one where language itself is fluid but can risk becoming an act of imposition. Considering whether to translate Luka’s novel misnamed after her, she wonders, “How would my own hand change the story, ineffably, imperceptibly, violently?” She acknowledges that narratives, in shaping reality, can both create and distort. Much like borders.
At the precipice of her middle ages, the narrator allows herself to become destabilized, to see the blurring lines of her selfhood not as a threat but an opportunity. She describes midlife not as a crisis but a “critical moment in which to pause, to see what might come next.” Archipelago is a novel of turnings; its narrator knows how to pause and gaze at the horizon, without the need for naming what lies beyond her sight, this moment. Perhaps Luka does not misname her by calling her Natalia; he misnames her by assigning her a name at all.
Towards the end of Archipelago, I thought less of The Odyssey and more of Emily Dickinson’s poem—the one that celebrates two Nobodies finding each other. A waitress at a restaurant asks the novel’s narrator who she is, and she replies, “I’m nobody.” In Dickinson’s poem, the speaker laments a fixed identity as “dreary” and “public.” She’d find excellent company in Bakopoulos’s narrator, a woman on the verge of a horizon she can’t see, and happier for it.
FICTION
Archipelago
By Natalie Bakopoulos
Tin House
Published August 19, 2025
