Search results for ""Author Patricia Felisa Barbeito""

Eager to flee the parochialism of her French upbringing, and a painful family past, the young and beautiful Marina falls in love with a seductive Greek sea-captain she meets at the port of Rouen. She follows him to the Aegean island of Syros to begin a new life as a married woman in the home of her formidable mother-in-law. Enchanted by the beauty of her surroundings, and fascinated by her husband's erudite younger brother, she aspires to learn all she can about contemporary Greek culture and live up to the ideals of her classical education. But when disaster upends her husband's shipping business and the comfortable stability of their life together, Marina's world slides into a vicious circle of love, passion, and death. Set in the early decades of the twentieth century, this is an exquisite account of the inner life of the heroine, and the collisions of different cultures and ways of being. In prose that ranges from the lyrical to the tersely realist, Karagatsis weaves a classic tale that is wide-ranging in its literary references, and devastating in its psychological nuance. This modern Greek tragedy has been made into a TV series and a highly acclaimed stage play, enjoying three sold-out seasons in Athens, and an international tour.

Read more less

Amanda Michalopoulou’s God’s Wife is a deceptive novel: it draws us close with promises of titillating confession and heart-warming intimacy only to send us on a conceptual scavenger hunt that probes the ethics of reading, writing, and the unspoken conventions of literary mastery. “It sounds like a lie, but I am His wife,” is the arresting opening declaration made by the novel’s unnamed narrator, who will always be known through her role as an appendage, “at His side.” This premise—bringing to mind as it does the very origins of the western novel: epistolary novels of romance as both salvation and captivity—immediately also raises issues of power, domination, truth and belief. God’s Wife, then, is ultimately a meditation on the power of literature to create a space of imaginative play. It is a love story, a philosophical treatise on the nature of faith and divinity, a self-conscious meditation on the nature of writing and creativity, and a feminist tract all rolled into one. What holds all these strands together is what can only be described as the compelling authenticity of the narrator’s voice and her relentless focus on the role of femininity as performance and convention in literature. Her voice is, of course, shaped by Michalopoulou’s inimitably spare, elegant and masterfully evocative prose, which like the narrator’s mother’s brand of storytelling, uses few words and eschews didacticism.

Read more less