Raise Your Soul by Yanis Varoufakis review – an intimate history of Greece

Yanis Varoufakis entered public consciousness as the academic in a leather jacket who briefly became Greece’s finance minister in 2015. For having the temerity to lecture his creditors on the folly of austerity, he was treated as the villain of the piece. Yet for all his swagger, he has always been a surprisingly sober thinker: Keynesian at heart, internationalist in instinct, he has built a reputation as a critic of dollar hegemony and Fortress Europe, a defender of both the precariat and refugees. You wonder if he’s experienced some schadenfreude in watching Germany’s economic miracle go bad of late – an implosion largely brought about by administering to itself the austerian medicine it once prescribed to the Greeks. His latest book, the 10th since 2010, departs from his usual sober fare. This time, he offers a collective portrait of five unyielding women in his life who, in their different ways, thumbed their noses at patriarchy and autocracy. Written after thugs beat him up in 2023 in what he described as a “brazen fascist attack”, this is a therapeutic enterprise that doubles as a counter-history of postwar Greece. First comes his mother, Eleni, raised in poverty having pigeons for supper, yet among the first women to study chemistry at Athens, despite the professors who urged her to trade equations for children. We then meet her brother Panayis, once a Siemens director and Nazi sympathiser, who became radicalised during the colonels’ dictatorship of 1967-74 and wound up behind bars for trying to blow up the ministry of industry. One of Varoufakis’s earliest memories is of a harrowing visit to one of the junta’s prisons to see Panayis; an argument with a soldier earned Eleni a slap across the face. Varoufakis’s paternal grandmother Anna, a Cairo socialite turned feminist radical, scandalised her gilded expatriate circle by learning Arabic, joining underground movements, and urging dockers to boycott fascist ships bound for Spain; her 1951 funeral drew thousands of Egyptian women, an ironic tribute in a land that became a hostile environment for foreigners under Nasser a year later. Varoufakis’s maternal grandmother, by contrast, was illiterate until her 60s. Though she was confined to inner-city Athens, Trisevgeni’s story allows him to take the full measure of the civil war, which lasted from 1946 to 1949. His ire falls predictably on American meddling, while Britain’s “white terror” – Churchill sending up to 75,000 troops to crush communism – earns only a half rebuke. Through her he also evokes the 50s with flair, a time when reading even “centrist newspapers, the Greek equivalent of the Guardian”, could cost you your livelihood. Georgia, grandmother of Varoufakis’s first wife, Margarita, supplies the book’s most novelistic chapter. Married to a sadistic ex-collaborator who once presented Varoufakis with a copy of Mein Kampf, she maintained that communist partisans had murdered her first husband. Some sleuthing reveals the reverse: the man had been a card-carrying communist himself, betrayed in memory in order to ensure survival in a postwar Greece crawling with fascists. Georgia denies it – until, one evening, she belts out a partisan song, sly confirmation from a widow who had played her role with aplomb. Finally comes Varoufakis’ second wife Danaë Stratou, textile heiress and conceptual artist, charting and condemning borders from Belfast to the West Bank. Varoufakis abandons the ivory tower to join her in these journeys. Not long after, politics recasts him as the famous half of the power couple. They do a photoshoot for Paris Match at their Acropolis flat, with Danaë leaping into his arms. Later, he is upset when the press paints her as a “glamorous, blonde, haute bourgeoisie trophy wife of a controversial motorcycle-riding minister”. These profiles allow Varoufakis to shoehorn in his own autobiography, from reading mathematical economics at “Red Essex”, where he improbably became spokesperson of the Black Students Alliance, to his later mission to “stop the rot in Greece”. The book works as microhistory but is marred by his bloviating style and schlocky prose: moons that heed prayers and so on. A character is described as “a contrarian’s contrarian”, and a few lines later as “a thinking radical’s thinking radical”. Worse, his subjects appear less as people than as ideological stand-ins: his father, Yorgo, the unreconstructed communist, Eleni the democratic socialist, Anna the feminist internationalist. He even sidesteps the juiciest rumour – that Danaë inspired the Pulp hit Common People, about a Greek student who enjoyed slumming it in London. • Raise Your Soul: A Personal History of Resistance by Yanis Varoufakis is published by Bodley Head (£22). To support the Guardian, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.