Reading the late Karapanou's (1946–2008) dizzying novel, which won the French prize for best foreign novel, is like sleepwalking, as the title suggests. The story takes place on a small, unnamed Greek island steeped in intrigue, sexuality, deception, mysticism, and crawling with cheeky expatriate artists. Manolis is the police officer who governs the town but more than that, he is the handsome, slim-hipped, tortured, and violent son of God. Each chapter, told from the perspective of Manolis and the various ex-pats, is a short story of its own, ranging in style from magic realism to horror. The sum of these parts is an engrossing novel that entrances readers, enabling them to understand its cast of motley characters' incomprehensible actions—many played out in dreams. The tenor of Karapanou's (Kassandra and the Wolf) final novel is best summed up by Manolis himself, as he observes the group of characters who come and go from his island: "The others just drank and cried and used art to disguise their hopelessness; for them art was the last stop, their final excuse to live a little longer." (Jan.)
This novel, or anti-novel, or collection of linked tours de force, opens with a bored and adolescent God vomiting a new savior onto an unnamed Greek island. Although in due time we discover that this new Christ is a bizarrely murderous, androgynous, sexually rabid police officer, this is only after Margarita Karapanou has abandoned her strange opening to introduce us to an assortment of blocked artists, homosexuals, and numerous other island dwellers. These characters resemble protagonists, but are more like fellow observers, albeit ones caught up in an increasingly lurid pageant that draws in everyone with the fascination of catastrophe. Karapanou's book feels like a naive form of modernism, each of the text's short, storylike chapters a work of bricolage built from the diverse materials circulating in her cluttered mind. Like the best art, her plots unfold without self-consciousness or apparent purpose, yet they resist simple interpretations and have an impressive structural solidity. Her extremely muscular, tight prose makes a fine medium for the book's relentlessly surreal, breathtakingly complex happenings, reminiscent of a Latin-inflected Pynchon. Though the book thus described may sound like a mess, The Sleepwalker in fact exudes a sense of strong thematic unity in its slow, relentless progress toward apocalypse-which, when it does arrive, is just as rich, satisfying, and inevitable as everything that has led up to it. If The Sleepwalker is any indication, Karapanou was a major voice whose books demand to be read.
"Margarita Karapanou leads us into the labyrinth where God lives. One must read her as one reads Rimbaud or Blake... Karapanou's insistence on tearing off our everyday clothes and ridiculous masks makes her, indeed, a truly remarkable writer."
As the novel opens God is pondering his creation of mankind and feeling that he has made an error. 'For the first time he felt sad, and deeply bored. He saw that his people were small and ridiculous, and he was gripped by an awful rage because he had created them with such love.' From the heavens, God pours rain onto a Greek man called Manolis who is thus, unknowingly, baptised the new Messiah. Manolis is a police officer on a Greek island that is partly populated by foreigners-artistic types seeking a paradise that will allow their creativity to flourish. The main characters are both eccentric and droll. Mark is a portrait-painter who cannot complete his works. His oeuvre consists of a multitude of headless forms, which his friends are secretly collecting and hoping to sell, one day, for a truckload of money. Ron knits incessantly and makes plans. Not one of the plans is implemented but he is compelled to continue. Maggie cooks astonishing, themed banquets for her friends. And then there is poor Luka, a writer who cannot put pen to paper and takes to drinking ink instead. As a kind of penance she also visits the slightly repulsive Anezoula and massages her legs as Anezoula tells strings of quirky stories. Karapanou throws her own vignettes into the mix and describes some farcical scenes which at times made me laugh out loud. Then, suddenly, The Sleepwalker takes a very dark turn and we begin to understand God's disappointment.
As the novel opens God is pondering his creation of mankind and feeling that he has made an error. 'For the first time he felt sad, and deeply bored. He saw that his people were small and ridiculous, and he was gripped by an awful rage because he had created them with such love.' From the heavens, God pours rain onto a Greek man called Manolis who is thus, unknowingly, baptised the new Messiah. Manolis is a police officer on a Greek island that is partly populated by foreigners-artistic types seeking a paradise that will allow their creativity to flourish. The main characters are both eccentric and droll. Mark is a portrait-painter who cannot complete his works. His oeuvre consists of a multitude of headless forms, which his friends are secretly collecting and hoping to sell, one day, for a truckload of money. Ron knits incessantly and makes plans. Not one of the plans is implemented but he is compelled to continue. Maggie cooks astonishing, themed banquets for her friends. And then there is poor Luka, a writer who cannot put pen to paper and takes to drinking ink instead. As a kind of penance she also visits the slightly repulsive Anezoula and massages her legs as Anezoula tells strings of quirky stories. Karapanou throws her own vignettes into the mix and describes some farcical scenes which at times made me laugh out loud. Then, suddenly, The Sleepwalker takes a very dark turn and we begin to understand God's disappointment.
On a Greek island where writers and painters gather, a new messiah sent down by a bored and bitterly disappointed God introduces mayhem to set straight the "small and ridiculous" beings who put pleasure and beauty above Law.
Originally published in 1985, but available in English only now,Karapanou's second novel (followingKassandra and the Wolf,1974)helped establish her as one of Greece's most admired postmodernists. The author, who died in 2008, also established herself with these books as one of the most wicked and unsparing observers of modern life. Her artist charactersare all suffering to begin with, bogged down in unfinished or unrealized works and lost in unfulfilling relationships. A painter is able to turn out only headless figures. A novelist who is too self-absorbed to enter his characters imagines "a violent death that might put me, just for a second, into the state you need to be in if you're going to write." His fantasy is realized. When the messiah, a cop named Manolis, takes his place among them, all charm and comfort on the surface but with devilish aims inside him, dark forces sweep through the community, leading to rape and murder and disappearances. Part crime novel, part satire, part metafiction, part phantasmagoria, the bookis anything but somnambulant. Karapanou writes with a headlong intensity, maintaining a jaundiced but playful tone even when the violence is at its most shocking. There's a kind of centrifugal force at work, pulling the large cast of characters helplessly toward a heart of darkness.
An absurdist tour de force about lost souls and a lost deity by a criminally neglected Greek novelist.
