Lina is back from London –where she is doing her postgraduate studies- to Athens because her grandmother is ill. She faces the flooding of her Athenian apartment. On top of that, her fiancé, Al, arrives from London too, and proposes to her –a proposal that soon ends up in physical assault and abandonment. Lina, while in Athens, takes part as an extra in the shooting of a film dedicated to a Greek poet. From this point and on, the plot of the novel interwines with the plot of the movie. Moreover Lina, in the context of her studies in creative writing and the visual arts, is writing short stories, a sort of fragmented family biography, combining each of them with a painting of Magritte. The novel originally contains 52 pictures of the Belgian painter introducing a dialogue between the text and the picture.

In a fragmented narration, Maroutsou gives a portrait of a woman in her mid- thirties who struggles to stand on her feet by trying to bridge the gap “between the train and the platform”, between expectation and reality, between the present and the past, between the picture and its interpretation, shaping gradually her identity as a writer.

A book that arrests the reader up until the last page as if trapping him/her in a baroque room with mirrors.

Kastaniotis, 2008, 375 p.