Margarita Karapanou

N. C. Germanacos

No retelling of Kassandra and the Wolf can explain its charm, or its riddles. [It] is one of those rare creations that come alive mysteriously, without any antecedents. The book is original, terrifying, complete. It invents its own history, eases in and out of nightmare as it mingles dream and fact. Kassandra and the Wolf is a short, muscular novel with an absolute sense of craft. The language throughout is merciless and crisp. [A] stunning achievement: a lovely, sinister book.New York Times

Kassandra and the Wolf

Karen Emmerich

Winner of the Prix de meilleur livre étranger/Prize for the best foreign novel, France. At the opening of Margarita Karapanou's stunning second novel, in disgust at mankind God vomits a new Messiah onto the earth. Or rather, onto a Greek island. Populated by villagers, ex-pats, artists, writers, this island is a Tower of Babel, a place where languages and individuals have been assembled, as though in wait for something as horrific and comic as this second coming. The Sleepwalker moves deftly and dizzyingly between genres--satire, murder mystery, magical realism, its own brand of Theater of the Absurd--following Manolis, the new Messiah, as he moves through this place and its characters like a sleepwalker, unaware to the very end of his divine nature. In The Sleepwalker Karapanou has created an unforgettable depiction of a dissolute world, desperately comic and full of compassion, a world in which nightmare and miracle both uneasily reside.

The Sleepwalker

The story is simple: a love affair ends badly. A woman and a man marry, then cruelty, infidelity, and divorce. But this novel tells their story twice, from opposing perspectives. Our sympathies are inverted; we don’t know whom to trust; the distinction between truth and deception blurs, and then seems simply to dissolve. The novel shifts deftly between endless oppositions: lover and beloved, angel and demon, master and slave, reader and writer. But inevitably both stories must arrive at the point of rien ne va plus: the moment in roulette when all bets are off and you either win or lose—the moment when the game becomes fate.

Margarita Karapanou

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