Special moments of the Greek novel during 2023 is recalled by APE-MPE, thus proposing a tour of the book market for the holidays.

Launch with a spartan parody. “The Suarev Trial” (Pataki Publications) of H. A. Chomenidis it has the atmosphere of a detective story, derives its factual data from the world of modern, struggling lawyers and is a parody of a court novel with a lot of spikes for the Greek environment of our days.

Edmonds Suareff, a former pianist and now a wholesaler of musical instruments, asks the lawyers of a famous law firm to take him to a mock trial for a murder of spousal jealousy that he committed in 1983. The reason is that after the passage of so many years the crime, still even if it has happened, it cannot be tried because of the statute of limitations. And here begins not the comedy of Greek society, but a trial that immobilizes its protagonists. With multiple smaller, overlapping stories of clients and lawyers, and with careful projections of the central characters, the Suarev trial develops into a parodic orgy worthy of Khomenides’ best related performances: trampling and sidestepping of legal rules, no real event, shoppers in Halloween costumes and improbable but inspired stories, a demon accused, who breaks families apart, office pool parties where the imagination fights with swords with the extermination of abandoned climbers, faces between annihilating caricature and silent drama. With the book’s open ending, the author allows the sufferers to be guided into an adult, more human perspective, demonstrating his writing sensitivity and maturity.

Love is the dominant element in his collection of short stories Vangelis Raptopoulou “Love, love, love” (Cedar), highlighting the right of passion, repentance, revulsion, fixation, cannibalism, unyielding assertion, physical stimulation, and even artistic intoxication, for both sexes and for all ages. What, however, connects the short stories of Raptopoulos to each other, apart from the previous general associations?

The last text of the collection, which also gives its title to the book, is a novella (and no longer a short story), where the fictitious autobiography of a comics creator (who adores Milo Manara) unfolds, in contrast to the previous short stories, ending in a trick with mirrored mirrors: on one side are the short stories and on the other the novella that contains them as comics which have been transcribed into erotic prose by the same author. The short stories are thus reflected in the novella, and the novella looks towards the short stories, otherwise maintaining its thematic autonomy intact. An inspired find, which functions either as a novel with spine or as a fragmented and eccentric whole. To add the mixing of humor and drama in tones that never lose their sharpness.

With his multi-page collection of short stories “A Tzafu Marina” (Pataki Publications) o Sotiris Dimitriou outlines protagonists who exude danger or suspicion and caution, but also inspire acquiescence or sympathy. As a short story writer, Dimitriou knows how to isolate moments and hours from the past and from the present. With extremely short texts, with a language that plays between popular (or even vernacular) expression and a somewhat inappropriate logic, with frequent declarations of the authorial presence and the construction process of literature in his short stories, with pieces that face each other with the other, with references to the native folktale, which prevailed in his novel “Heaven from Other Places” (2021), with third-person and first-person narration, Dimitriou confirms his skill to dig beneath the unnecessary style in which they speak and his heroes are presented, igniting despair or essentially hoarding their innocence.

THE “Ephemeral” (Kastaniotis Publications) of Marilis Margomenou it is a novel about terrorism, which confirms her well-known authorial virtues: she sets mesmerizingly intense cinematic shots, invents secondary stories that are not absolutely critical to the central plot, and expresses herself in an extremely precise language.

The book also moves on two initially distinct narrative levels – one unfolding in 1999 and the other in 2018. Leonidas Dracomallos, a young editor of the newspaper “Ephimeros”, Alcibiades Britas, its director, and Thomas Nearchos, the publisher , are members of the City Rebels organization with a genius cover. Their fortification is the newspaper itself, whose pyramidal hierarchy (the line descends from the top, but never reverses) has been transferred intact to the City Rebels. The whole atmosphere certainly refers to November 17, with the difference that Margomenou is not based on actual events and journalistic records. What she is primarily interested in is not terrorism per se, but the angry spirit of its time and how such a spirit involves the heroes on a path to their existential descent and ultimately to self-destruction.

And the cycle closes with his graphic novel Soloup (according to Antonis Nikolopoulos) “Zorbas. Green stone beautiful” (Diopter). The purpose of the comic is to detach Zorbas from the model of a local and supposedly naive and simplistic reveler, which dominated internationally through the film of Michalis Kakogiannis, and to return to the spirit of Kazantzakis and the capital motifs – questions that have been written into the identity of: what is the relation of love to death, what does God require of men and of himself, where the flesh meets the spirit, how males treat females, what is masculine boldness and recklessness, how is it possible to have a communal life capable of nurturing the most authentic needs of existence, how to respond to the terror of death without losing sight of the irresistible impulse of freedom?