Last year, when I focussed on Palestinians literature, I commented how grim it was because all the books were about the oppression suffered by the Palestinians, primarily from the Israelis but also from the Ottomans and British. The twentieth century was not too good for the Greeks though not as bad as it was for … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Apostolos Doxiadis‘ Ο Θείος Πέτρος και η Εικασία του Γκόλντμπαχ (Uncle Petros and Goldbach’s Conjecture). The narrator has an uncle Petros who leads a solitary life and is despised by his two younger brothers for being a failure. The narrator does some sleuthing and finds out that Uncle … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Thanassis Valtinos‘ Στοιχεία για τη δεκαετία του ’60 (Data from the Decade of the Sixties). As the title of this book, tells us, though it calls itself a novel, is not really a novel but a mish-mash of information about what was going on in Greece during he … Read more
The latest addition to my website isChristos Chrissopoulos‘ Ο βομβιστης του Παρθενώνα ( The Parthenon Bomber). As the title tells us this is about a man who blows up the Parthenon. We follow various aspects of the story, starting with his account, though we are warned that there are vagarious alleged accounts and it is … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Christos Papadimitriou‘s Turing : A Novel about Computation. Ethel, a computer scientist who has developed a relevance search engine, is on holiday in Greece, looking for a Greek god. She meets Alexandros, a twice-divorced archaeologist much older than her. They start an affair. She gets pregnant but heads … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Maro Douka‘s Η αρχαία σκουριά (Fool’s Gold). The heroine/narrator of this novel, set in Athens between 1967 and 1974, is Myrsini, the only child of bourgeois parents. She considers herself to be centrist. However early on the Greek colonels take over. She gets involved in the opposition but … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Margarita Karapanou‘s Ο υπνοβάτης (The Sleepwalker). The novel starts with God clearly unhappy with his creation so he vomits on Maniolis to create a handsome God, since all they worshipped was beauty. We now move to a Greek island, clearly based on Hydra which is full of dissolute … Read more
The latest addition to my website ‘s is Margarita LiberakiΤα Ψάθινα Καπέλα (Three Summers). Unlike most of the Greek novels I have read, this one does not get into 20th century Greek history and politics but is a primarily cheerful tale. It tells the tale of three sisters living with their divorced mother, aunt and … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Alexis Stamatis‘ :Μπαρ Φλωμπέρ (Bar Flaubert). Our hero is Yannis Loukas. His father is a famous novelist but he, while publishing stories, is now, almost forty, in a rut, both professionally and romatically. While helping his father with his autobiography he comes across a manuscript written by one … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Antonis Samarakis: Το λάθος (The Flaw). In an unamed country a man is arrested by the National Security Department for being part of a group opposed to the Regime. They are to drive him to Central in the capital where he will be interrogated. However the NSD has … Read more