April 1980. Theodore Kentrotas puts an end to his life in a Geneva park, near the tranquil lake and the snowy Alpine peaks.
April 1820. An ancestor of his by the same name digs a naked marble woman out of his field on an island in the Aegean. He falls in love with her to distraction – and destruction.
Do not let me leave you. Why have you forsaken me?
The beauty that will save the world has something overwhelming about it. Madness, delirium, a passion for possession, and a fear of abandonment all mark the life of five generations.
The never-ending story will be transformed in the hands of a five-year-old girl.
The Greek Patient converses with decay: I am this marble; I am ageless. That which is missing makes me live.
After all, the end is a lie. Dying is to go away for a short while.
Kastaniotis, 2018, 176 pages
About her previous novel Secret sister (published the US and Uk among other countries):
“…contemporary Greek writing is currently awash with interpretations of “the crisis” and attempts to contextualise and understand the unravelling of a country with a complex past and an increasingly heart-broken present. The Secret Sister is the story of third-generation Greek American Jonathan as he takes his first trip to the motherland. It is a slim novel, but hallucinatory and intense. Reading it feels like stepping into another person’s dream, and indeed in a recent lecture given in Athens Tsalikoglou told a packed room: “Greeks feel like they are in a bad dream”. It is a story of painful memories, both collective and personal, that will no longer be kept quiet.”
The Secret Sister, brought to us by Europa Editions, is about the legacy of trauma. It gives us a powerful taste of the writing that has been fired into existence in Greece by the dramatic changes of late, and it leaves me, for one, wanting to read much more.’
—The Independent
