THE UNKNOWN CALLAS: THE GREEK YEARS Nicholas Petsalis-Diomidis Amadeus Press 1-57467-059-X Hardback, £29.99, US$39.95

An extremely readable (though slightly over-detailed) account of Callas' years in Athens before and during the Second World War. Certainly not for the faint-hearted!

The Maria Callas legend is one that has been the subject of countless books and articles since well before her untimely death in 1977. Yet, despite this, little material concerns Callas' early life, in particular her formative years as a student in Greece, an act of omission that Petsalis-Diomidis attempts to redress in his gargantuan biography The Unknown Callas: The Greek Years. Callas' is a real rags-to-bitches story, following her life from an inauspicious birth in America, the daughter of a neurotic mother and a womanising father, whose separation heralded Callas' return to Greece the daugher of a broken home. Egged on by her over-bearing and, if we are to believe Petsalis-Diomidis, hateful mother, whose only aim was to make money off the back of the unfortunate Maria, she was enrolled first at the National Conservatory, before moving on to the Athens Conservatory, where she received her first successes as the fledgling diva of the future.

It is a horrible story; Callas' hatred for most of those around her, and in particular her truly contemptuous mother, led to such episodes of antisocial behaviour as screaming fits, plate-hurling and torrents of invective directed at anyone and everyone. And if such incidents weren't bad enough, as soon as the war began they got worse. Italian, then German and finally British soldiers were entertained in the family home, rich boyfriends were encouraged to court Maria's unfortunate sister Jackie purely for the financial gain; even Maria herself was required to go into local bars to 'be nice' to occupying soldiers in the hope that they might bring in a little money or food. And alongside this is Callas' equally horrific time at the Greek National Opera where everything that went before pales into insignificance. There the knives were really out, a story where physical abuse, jealousies and hatred become embroiled in a mixing pot of underhand, sordid dealings, a far cry from the public image that the chic (and by then, considerably thinner) Callas carefully contrived during her years of international stardom.

Winner of Greece's National Book Award for Biography in 1999, The Unknown Callas is certainly a well-researched and detailed volume, even if one feels the urge to skip through large chunks of seemingly unnecessary material. It is not so much a biography as a collation of Petsalis-Diomidis' research, much of it inconsequential and irrelevant to the tale, with too many unnecessary reminiscences of, for example, yet another old (and not very close) acquaintance, or intricate and tedious accounts of her examinations, (complete with facsimile mark sheets) at the Conservatory. No stone is left unturned in an attempt to discover the real Callas of those years, and incident after incident is afforded more than ample space in which to say something we have read countless times before. Yet it is an exceedingly readable story and, despite Callas' god-like stature amongst Greek people, Petsalis-Diomidis' account remains intriguingly dispassionate. Readers are left to make up their own minds on the legend, despite a plethora of material that, in the case of her wartime collaborations, would have been enough to damn the Callas name and memory in Athenian circles forever.

Sophie Baker