From Booklist
Cruelty, humiliation, and ugly secrets, laced with thin threads of kindness, form the substance of life in the imaginary Greek island on which Karnezis sets the stories in his debut collection. The stories, unfolding in a post-World War II society on the verge of melting into modern culture, are equally dark and funny. The humor, which ranges from subtle to farcical, is never played just for laughs. In the most broadly comic of the stories, "Jeremiad," a man dies quietly while waiting his turn at the state pensions office. His death goes undetected by the others in the room, each too absorbed in his or her own drama to notice he died, even after the silent stranger begins to putrefy. The final sentence of the story works on one level as a punch line, on another as a poignant comment on aging and mortality. Throughout the collection, magic realism leaves fingerprints on the brutally authentic surface of the stories. Although Greek is the author's first language, Karnezis wields English seductively and with devastating skill. Karen Holt
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved -- Dieser Text bezieht sich auf eine vergriffene oder nicht verfügbare Ausgabe dieses Titels.
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved -- Dieser Text bezieht sich auf eine vergriffene oder nicht verfügbare Ausgabe dieses Titels.
Pressestimmen
"Downright miraculous...spry and playful, sly and macabre...Karnezis's language is fresh, lyrical, natural... seduc[ing] you into its magically real and soon-to-be-spectral world."--The New York Times Book Review
"A deft stylist: clear and direct, yet subtly ironic...Like many of the masters of this genre--Guy de Maupassant, Flannery O'Connor, Eudora Welty--Karnezis is adept at delivering one startling surprise after another." --Los Angeles Times
"Fierce, twisted, darkly funny stories...[Karnezis] has a sharp, unsentimental eye for contemporary Greek life, while deftly adding intimations of the pagan past." --The New Yorker
"Sly, witty, fantastical, and tragic, with just a touch of something old-fashioned about them...A terrific read." --The Seattle Times
"What a find!...The fruit of an exceptional and leaping imagination...One searches for comparisons--what one might get if Kafka collaborated with Hal Hartley, Aesop, and Italo Calvino--but Karnezis's originality and freshness, his vivid turns of phrase, are his alone."--Annie Proulx
"A deft stylist: clear and direct, yet subtly ironic...Like many of the masters of this genre--Guy de Maupassant, Flannery O'Connor, Eudora Welty--Karnezis is adept at delivering one startling surprise after another." --Los Angeles Times
"Fierce, twisted, darkly funny stories...[Karnezis] has a sharp, unsentimental eye for contemporary Greek life, while deftly adding intimations of the pagan past." --The New Yorker
"Sly, witty, fantastical, and tragic, with just a touch of something old-fashioned about them...A terrific read." --The Seattle Times
"What a find!...The fruit of an exceptional and leaping imagination...One searches for comparisons--what one might get if Kafka collaborated with Hal Hartley, Aesop, and Italo Calvino--but Karnezis's originality and freshness, his vivid turns of phrase, are his alone."--Annie Proulx
Kurzbeschreibung
In a nameless Greek village, the lives of its citizens--the priest, the whore, the doctor, the seamstress, the mayor--and even its animals--a centaur, a parrot that recites Homer, a horse called History--are entwined. As their lives intersect, their hidden crimes, their little infamies, are revealed, in a place full of passion, cruelty, and deep reserves of black humor.<BR>
Über den Autor
Panos Karnezis was born in Greece in 1967. He moved to England in 1992 to study engineering, and worked in industry before he started to write. He was awarded an M.A. in creative writing by the University of East Anglia. He lives in London.
