Lila Konomara was born in Athens in 1960. She studied contemporary literature in Paris and worked for several years as a professor at the French Institute in Athens. She now works as a translator. For her book Macao she received the Diavazo prize for best first-time author in 2003. And The Dinner was in the short-list of Diavazo prize. In 2017 she was invited in the Villa Concordia project where she finished Let this world remain.
The plot of the novel is based on a real fact and it takes place in one year’s time. The main characters are members of a family: the father, a 63 year-old pharmacist, the eldest daughter, 28 year-old Eve, a biologist doing research concerning microchips that could recall the memory, and the teenager son Aris, aged 17. These three are also the narrators of the story as each chapter is presented by one of them, in his own particular style.
A dinner between friends in a wonderful summer night in Athens. Everything seems nice and everyone looks happy till we see the details that make the difference.
Fear of losing job destroys old friendships, body needs don’t care about long date trust. A series of facts during that night will change the lives of most of these people.
In the first novella in the book, an ancient Chinese book on chess falls into the hands of Mr Morgan. As the old man begins reading the book, he discovers that it possesses the power to make its readers relive their past. However, this book’s power is not without a cost… In the second novella, two friends are shipwrecked in the middle of the Indian Ocean and are picked up by the crew of a cruise liner on its way to Macao. However, the two heroes soon realize that they are trapped on a voyage that conceals many secrets and riddles.
Four seasons succeed one another, compressing the aroma of an entire life: a huge piano, no longer in use, one hundred and twenty eight pairs of shoes hidden in a room. In front of the window, crimson flowers grow day by day, as if in an abnormal way. Three voices unravel a story: a man, a woman and a narrator – or is it the man who rewrites facts? The past and the present come to light through parallel monologues and silence. Pauses. Dashes. Lives fixed on a detail.
Metaixmio, 144 p.
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