Naming and identity

Naming and identity connects the novel’s questions of heritage, intimacy, and self-definition: a surname can claim a history its bearer cannot speak, while a form of address can either impose a role or recognize a person’s chosen name. In scenes with Juan and Dr Gómez, Sofia Papastergiadis and Rose Papastergiadis encounter names as both social labels and invitations to explain who they are. Elsewhere, family histories and competing descriptions of the sea extend the same concern beyond personal names, showing how identity depends on who gets to describe a person, a place, or an experience.

Inherited names and unsettled belonging

When Juan asks whether Sofia is Greek, she gives the familiar account: her father is Greek, her mother English, and she was born in Britain. The question seems simple, but it makes her explain herself through nationality and parentage before any closer knowledge of her is established. Juan’s distracted attention makes the exchange feel less like a personal encounter than a demand for a ready-made answer. His own description of Greece as a country unable to pay its bills leads him to say that a dream is over; when Sofia asks whether he means the economy, he explains that he is studying for a master’s degree at the School of Philosophy at Granada University and has a summer job at the beach injury hut. He admits that the phrase was something he had probably read, not a settled opinion of his own. Sofia’s reflection on it turns the conversation toward authority: only the dreamer can say that a dream has ended on their behalf.

The question of who can speak for whom becomes personal when Juan speaks a sentence to Sofia in Greek and appears surprised to learn that she cannot speak the language. Her surname, Papastergiadis, marks a Greek inheritance that she does not possess as fluency. She experiences this mismatch as a constant embarrassment: the name makes her Greek ancestry visible, while her inability to speak her father’s language seems to her like a failure to meet what the name implies. The episode distinguishes descent from lived competence without resolving the tension between them. Sofia is not simply outside Greek identity, but neither can she inhabit it in the uncomplicated way that a surname might lead another person to expect.

That divided inheritance also appears in Sofia’s account of the dorado she steals and prepares. As she guts the fish, she thinks of the Greek side of her family, from Thessaloniki, as knowing how to clean a fish without consulting Google, and imagines an ancient Greek family catching plaice in the shallows of the Aegean. She sets this inherited image against the Yorkshire side of her family, associated with buying fish from trawlermen who had endured cold, dangerous seas. The fish in her hands brings those histories into one bodily act: neither identity is just a label, because each is attached to a remembered or imagined way of living. Her family story does not make the two sides identical; it gives their differences a place within the same account of herself.

Rose and the right to be addressed

At Dr Gómez’s clinic, the negotiation becomes explicit. He addresses Rose as Mrs Papastergiadis, then asks whether he may call her Rose. Rose agrees and explains that it is her name, that her daughter calls her Rose, and that she sees no reason he should not do the same. Her answer is both permission and correction: the formal surname does not cancel the name she uses in her relationship with her daughter. When Dr Gómez asks Sofia whether she calls her mother Rose, Sofia answers quickly and treats the matter as unimportant, although it is the second time she has been asked the question in three days. The repeated question suggests that their form of address is noticeable to outsiders, while Sofia’s brisk response refuses to turn it into an explanation.

Sofia also asks how they should address the consultant. Dr Gómez says that his professional status makes Mr Gómez formally correct, but that this would be too formal and he will not mind being called Gómez. The exchange gives him a chance to demonstrate that naming is not merely a matter of rank: the most formal option is available, yet he can choose to make the encounter less distant. His easy pronunciation of Papastergiadis offers a quiet contrast with Sofia’s discomfort about the name. Where she hears a burden of inherited language in it, he handles it as an ordinary name while still asking Rose how she wishes to be addressed.

Later, Dr Gómez makes the problem of address part of his conversation with Rose. He explains that Gómez is his father’s surname and Lucas his mother’s, and that although his formal name is Gómez Lucas, he has made a shorter name for himself. He compares this with Rose’s formal name, Mama, and the movement among Rose, Mrs Papastergiadis, and Mother. In his account, naming is a passage between family position, public formality, and personal preference. Rose calls his point sentimental, but the conversation gives the names practical weight: they are not interchangeable labels, because each carries a different relation and a different degree of distance. Sofia’s jealousy as Dr Gómez attends closely to Rose further shows that recognition is relational; the attention directed toward one person makes another aware of attention she feels she has never received.

Naming experience and place

The novel’s concern with naming also shapes Sofia’s efforts to interpret her mother’s needs. In the injury hut, the hum of a small fridge prompts her to wonder whether it contains water, and she thinks in terms of agua con gas and agua sin gas while searching for a version that will be more right than wrong for Rose. The practical distinction between water with or without gas becomes a miniature of the larger problem: a name or category may help someone respond, but it cannot guarantee that the choice will suit the person receiving it. Sofia’s attention is directed toward the limits of labels as well as their usefulness.

At a deserted beach opposite a cement factory, the word medusas names a danger that the friendly waiter makes vivid. He warns Sofia not to swim after three people have been badly stung that morning, describing welts that turned white and then purple. His grimace and gestures as he tries to push away the ocean and its medusas make the label part of a bodily warning, not an abstract classification. Around him are gas canisters, cranes from a desalination plant, cement powder, unfinished hotels, and a cargo ship flying a Greek flag. The setting places inherited national symbols beside industrial change and physical risk; Sofia’s attention moves among them without allowing any single name to explain the whole landscape.

The account of the sea police and a gasoline spill later sharpens the difference between naming and knowing. After testing the water, the officers order swimmers out. Ingmar disputes their machines and insists that the water is clean, but when they tell him to taste it, he drinks from a bottle scooped into the sea and then agrees there has been a spill. He becomes ill and wants to sue the officers for making him taste the water. The episode places official measurement, personal assertion, and bodily experience in direct conflict: each offers a way to describe the same water, and the body supplies a consequence that neither name can erase. When Sofia suggests that the contamination might be the corpse of Pablo’s dog, the explanation is treated as certain by her companion, though the exchange offers no confirmation. The comic leap shows how readily a name or proposed cause can become an account of events before it has been established.

Identity as negotiation

Across these scenes, naming moves between inheritance and choice, between the names other people use and the names a person accepts for herself. Sofia’s Greek surname makes her ancestry legible but also exposes a gap between family origin and language; her recollection of Greek and Yorkshire food histories makes that divided inheritance concrete rather than resolving it into a single category. Rose, by contrast, states plainly that Rose is her name and authorizes Dr Gómez to use it. His own distinction between Gómez Lucas and Gómez shows that a shorter, chosen form can coexist with a longer family name rather than simply replacing it.

The subject’s recurring significance lies in this refusal to treat names as transparent facts. A name can preserve kinship, invite recognition, or create embarrassment; a form of address can soften professional distance or make a family relation visible to outsiders. Even descriptions of water and danger remain open to challenge when official categories meet taste, pain, and consequence. Identity in these episodes is neither freely invented nor fixed by ancestry alone: it emerges through repeated acts of naming, answering, correcting, and deciding which descriptions can be lived with.