The twenty-six chapters of the third novel by Zyranna Zateli trilogy with the mysterious name of Ramanthis Erebus, take place in the late 1950s, somewhere in northern Greece, with flashbacks going back to the first decades of the twentieth century. We follow the story of five siblings (four women and one man) who, within a dozen years, will all inexorably die in their prime, leaving behind a single offspring: the thirteen-year-old boy of one of the sisters, a creature that has inherited “secret gifts and sufferings” who, before he too is wiped out by lightning, will leave a catalytic, literally unforgettable mark on the entire mood of the book. But a thousand and two other stories are born and woven around this central motif, manifested through deep and circular journeys through time. It is a dive into the human condition itself, into the complexities of truth, reality and dream – into the fears and pleasures of our existence, our loves and our dead. It should also be emphasized that children, animals, natural phenomena and some pagan remnants (such as the fire processions still practiced in some parts of northern Greece) take on the value and weight of an archetypal view of the world. After all, the essential “plot” of Zyranna Zateli’s work is the incessant intricacy of writing itself, the eternal interplay between the adventure of the human soul -in its most mysterious convulsions- and the conscious struggle of man to articulate his fate in speech – in other words, between the unspeakable itself and literature as an act of initiation and self-redemption. Zyranna Zateli has been called a “sophisticated Scheherazade”, which suits her well enough, but not to the point that this too – in her case – sounds like a conventional rendering.

Kastaniotis, 2021, 724 p.