iris literary agency

L'ultime Humiliation

Written by

The novel focuses on the night that Athens was torched: Sunday 12 February 2012.

Two women, a former philologist and a former painter, who happen to be roommates in an inner city “guest house”, secretly join the demonstrations.

Their sidelong glance penetrates – in its own special way – the invisible and symbolic aspect of the violent clashes. They panic, they get lost in their own city, they are forced to beg, but without ever losing their personal sense of things. When they return, they are closer to the unattainable Ithaca.

The anarchist son of one of the two women, the neo-Nazi son of a third one who looks after them, a young refugee and her child, a doctor and a social worker, the ghosts of a derelict Athenian home and, of course, the recently homeless – all cross paths in different ways with the two of them, either in an Athens which is being rent asunder, or a little later.

English translation available

In this anthropocentric political novel, the generation marked by the Polytechnic uprising against the dictatorship in 1974, now on its way out, initiates the difficult, necessary, and perhaps inevitable dialogue with today’s uprisings, with the huge upheaval that life has undergone in the past few years, with memory, and with the Ultimate Humiliation of the city.

French and Spanish rights sold

KASTANIOTIS EDITIONS, 2015, 336 P.

Galanaki Rhea

Rhea Galanaki was born in Heraklion, Crete in 1947. She studied History and Archaeology in Athens. She has published novels, short stories, poems and essays. She’s been twice awarded the Greek National Book Award (in 1999 for her novel Eleni, or Nobody and in 2005 for her short- story collection An Almost Blue Hand). She has also received the Athens Academy Award For Prose (in 2003, for her novel The Age of Labyrinths), the Nikos Kazantzakis Award of the Heraklion Municipality in 1987 and the National Book Center of Greece Readers’ Award in 2006 for her fictional biography Silent, Deep Waters. Her novel The Life of Ishmael Ferik Pasha is the first Greek book to have been included in the Unesco Collection of Representative Works (1994), while Eleni, or Nobody was shortlisted for the Aristeion Prize (1999). Her books have been translated into fifteen languagues: English, French, German, Spanish, Italian, Dutch, Czech, Bulgarian, Swedish, Lithuanian, Turkish, Arabic, Chinese, Hebrew and Albanian.

Latest from Galanaki Rhea