Sofia’s uncertainty about her Greek heritage

Sofia Papastergiadis’s uncertainty about her Greek heritage is not a question of whether her father was Greek, but of what that inheritance means when she was born in Britain, raised mostly in English, and cannot speak her father’s language. Her surname makes ancestry visible before she can explain it; other people then treat that visible sign as a test of whether she is Greek enough. Across the novel, embarrassment and irritation sit beside moments when Greek words and family history surface on her own terms.

Identity and Background

Sofia identifies herself as British-born, with a Greek father and an English mother. Her father left her mother when Sofia was five, and her mother mostly speaks to her in English. The details make her lack of Greek more than a private failure of study: the language was not the language of her childhood household. Yet her surname, Papastergiadis, continues to announce a paternal inheritance that strangers expect her to embody. She describes the mismatch as a constant embarrassment, especially because people struggle to say or spell the name while it still prompts assumptions about who she is.

Her sense of identity is also shaped by a present life that does not fit neatly into a settled professional or national category. At a beach first-aid hut, while being treated for a sting, she fills in a form that asks for her occupation. She has a degree in anthropology but temporarily works at the Coffee House, a café in West London with free Wi-Fi, renovated church pews, and its own roasted coffee. The form’s blank space makes the question feel unexpectedly difficult: neither her degree nor her current work seems to state the whole of who she is. When the student asks whether anthropologists study primitive people, she answers that the only primitive person she has studied is herself. The joke turns anthropology back on the person being classified, echoing the way she examines the labels others apply to her.

Other People’s Tests of Belonging

At the first-aid hut, the student notices Sofia’s surname and asks if she is Greek. She gives the familiar account of her parentage and birthplace, but he then speaks a full sentence to her in Greek. When she says she does not understand, the exchange exposes the gap between descent and language in a way that feels like a judgment. She experiences his response as a mild insult to her Greekness, and resents the intrusion: he is meant to be attending to her sting, not deciding how Greek she ought to be. His assumption gives the encounter its force. Greek identity is treated as something her appearance and name should guarantee, while her actual upbringing is made to look like a deficiency.

Another conversation turns that test into a comparison of bodies. Dr Gómez examines Sofia alongside her mother, Rose Papastergiadis, and remarks on their differences: Sofia’s skin is darker and sallow, her hair nearly black, her nose longer, and her eyes brown, while Rose has light-brown hair and blue eyes. Sofia restates that her father is Greek and she was born in Britain, but remains unsure whether the description of her skin is meant as praise or insult. The comparison does not resolve her identity; it shows how quickly other people make the body serve as evidence. Even within her family, visible resemblance and difference invite classifications that cannot explain the uneven transmission of language, upbringing, and belonging.

Language, Memory, and Inheritance

The pressure of not speaking Greek is complicated by moments in which the language appears without being supplied by anyone else. During a wish, Sofia is surprised to hear herself whisper the words in Greek. The moment does not establish fluency or settle her relationship to her ancestry. Its significance lies in the contrast: the language she cannot produce when a stranger demands proof emerges privately, in an act of wishing, outside the student’s examination. Greek is not simply absent from her; nor does the unexpected phrase erase the history that made its absence embarrassing.

A stolen gilt-head bream gives her another way to imagine inheritance. As she prepares the fish, she thinks of the Greek side of her family as coming from Thessaloniki and imagines that its ancient Greek relatives would have caught plaice in the shallows of the Aegean. She sets this imagined maritime history beside the Yorkshire side of her family, whose fish came from dockside trawlermen who had endured Arctic seas and long hours on deck in raw winds. These are not equivalent claims of firsthand cultural knowledge: they are contrasting family stories through which Sofia tries to place herself. The fish’s weight, scales, and blood make that reflection part of a physical act, rather than an abstract account of descent. Her heritage comes into view as a mixture of inherited narratives and present choices, including the act of taking and preparing food.

Belonging Without Resolution

Sofia’s uncertainty persists because the novel offers no simple credential that would make her ancestry feel secure. The beach student’s Greek sentence, Dr Gómez’s comparison of her features with Rose’s, and Sofia’s own account of her family all reveal different, incomplete ways of reading identity. A surname can provoke an expectation; a body can be interpreted as a sign; a family history can explain why a language was not learned. None alone determines what belonging should feel like.

The recurring attention to water and bodily sensation gives this uncertainty a grounded setting. After Sofia is stung on a beach, the student explains how transparent Medusas can sting at a distance, and treats her arm with ointment. As she waits in the small hut, the refrigerator’s hum prompts her to think of the different water she might find for her mother. Later, the coast is described through warnings and disputes about what the sea contains: Ingrid recounts that sea police ordered swimmers out after detecting a gasoline spill, while a local operator challenged their reading of the water and became sick after tasting it. Such moments do not explain Sofia’s ancestry, but they make a useful counterpoint to its social tests: appearances and labels do not always disclose what lies beneath. Her Greek inheritance remains neither disproved by her upbringing nor made complete by a sudden word, a surname, or another person’s verdict.