At first sight this looks like a story about jealousy. However, the tale which emerges of unrequited love serves as an excuse for engaging with the pathological processes of the old world, of ownership, oedipal obsession and the urban elite. These are explored through a focus on their strangeness and on a kind of dark lyricism which they possess, and which accompanies the hero in an interminable, delirious interpretation of omens. The work is constructed out of sign language, hallucinations, and baffling suspensions and reversals of realistic behaviour, until the final disintegration. Written in a style which has been compared to Céline’s Journey to the End of the Night, the novel mocks the psychological distortions of the conventional world, as well as the linguistic usages whereby society’s collective irrationality persists in opposing the irrationality of the individual. Thus besieged, the hero seeks escape in madness and alcohol, in self-destruction and the subversion of rhetorical conventions.
‘…a book which is of interest to all but which could only be written by one […] an unrelenting exercise of eavesdropping on the soul […] sentences of incredible sinuosity, transformed by a juggling act […] a goldmine of literary inventiveness. Occasions such as this, where the soul is propelled onward in literature, are not everyday occurrences.’ Kostis Papyiorgis, O Kosmos tou Vivliou, Nos. 6-7. ‘In the grotesque scene which comes in the final chapter of the book, Aranitsis demonstrates his explosive talent. Carnival, considered by Bakhtin to be a manifestation of the grotesque par excellence, changes here into a crazy party, leading up to the final scene of paroxysm. I found it impossible to count the discoveries that come one after the other in the last chapter.’ Thanasis Dokos, Anti, No. 420.
Ikaros, 1988, 488 p.
