Here is the portrait of an extraordinary - yet in many ways typical - English couple, as seen through the eyes of a fascinated, ouzo-guzzling Greek narrator reminiscing on a sundrenched beach....
The protagonist in each of these stories is a solitary individual, alienated from society, haunted Dy memurira, fascinated by the disgusting, obsessed with the relationship between love and death, and fetishistically attached to certain objects that bear the traces of traumatic experiences....
In his brilliantly constructed novel, Spiros Plaskovitis counterpoints his enigmatic heroine -Anghelina Dassiou- agianst the touristic "development" (or destruction?) of most Greek islands today....
Who was Alexius Comnenus who would wage war in East and West to save Byzantium from the edge of the abyss? Who were the woman who loved him? Who was it who tried to poison him? Why did his daughter, Anna Comnena, hate her brother, John, the co-Emperor? Why did his wife, Irene Duca, promote Nicephorus Bryennius for the throne? People and events; failures, tears and sorrows, hopes, visions that faded, joys evaporated, meanness and passion....
A story of the passion between a man of fifty "plus" and a girl of nineteen, a seemingly not unusual situation were it not for the fact that everything that takes place between the two "protagonists* is constantly and faithfully recorded by someone: the mature "grey" woman who is the man s past and who chronicles the lovers passion with adoration and respect....
They re the gang that can t shoot straight: tough-guy wannabes straight out of a Greek-subtitled version of Thieves Like Us, downmarket motorcycle punks (no Hell s angels these), dead-end kids from the urban depths with foulmouthed girlfriends and parents as remote as prosperity....