The latest addition to my website is Vassilis Vassilikos‘ Γλαύκος Θρασάκης (The Few Things I Know about Glafkos Thrassakis). Our unnamed narrator is writing a biography about painter and author Glafkos Thrassakis. Thrassakis is now deceased, allegedly eaten by New Guinean cannibals, though that fact, like many others in this book may well be wildly inaccurate. The biographer gets his information from many, often contradictory sources. A key source is three bags of material Glafkos gave to a US university with the proviso that they should not be opened for twenty-five years . Glafkos spent many years abroad for political reasons and the narrator struggles to track down sources. He also has his own issues, getting finance – a Danish countess, the EU and a US organisation like the Lions Club are all involved. He also finds that he is too closely identifying with Glafkkos. It is a bit of a mishmash of a book as we get summaries of Glafkos’ works and excerpts from his notebook
and we jump around the world as the narrator and we try to learn a few things about Glafkos.