Red Scars
Seventeen short, everyday stories that intersect with the grand narrative of official History, and highlight the wounds that still bleed.
The seventeen short everyday stories in the collection, as they intersect with the grand official History, focus on the suffering body and emphasise its social significance through processes of manipulation, surveillance, punishment, mourning and violence. We see bodies that are confined and submissive, easily bending to respond to visible and invisible technologies of power, but also others that resist in order to undermine and/or overturn the conditions of their lives. In every case, the bodies are marked. Moreover, the general title Red Scars emphasises the mark of precisely this deep physical wound that is still bleeding.
Although precise temporal and spatial references are generally avoided, one can, guided even by these few precise markers, situate oneself in moments of the civil war and post-civil war years, and the dictatorship, and be led in various ways (for example, through reinterpretations of mythological and biblical episodes) to the critical issues of today.
- Pages: 136
- ISBN: 978-960-572-081-0
- Publication: 2015
- Categories: Literature, Books, Greek Literature
The tension in all the stories in the book is high and the drama is at its peak; however, the language Mique uses almost automatically shields her from melodrama and sentimentality.
– Vangelis Hatzivassiliou, To Vima tis KyriakisIn any case, it is precise and skilfully crafted. The intensity of the drama is sometimes necessary, especially in the times we live in, where the visions at the heart of history are more ominous than ever. And the narrative fabric, so skilfully woven by the debutant yet already established philologist and academic Mary Mike, is deeply comforting.
– Tina Mandilara, lifo.gr...In the end, Mike manages to bring all the stories together and gather all the women from her stories around the same table, as if this group of twelve were a small Last Supper, a ‘Secret Funeral Supper’ that manages to calm the troubled waters of a tormented reality...
– Yannis Antoniadis, culturenow.gr"...Mike thematises and brings to life the red scars of women who have been tested historically, mentally and physically. The scar persists as a visible and indelible reminder of the old, latent trauma and the living anguish that accompanies it..."
– Theodosis Nikolaidis, Ta Nea"...I read Mary Mike’s short stories and realise that in each one I find forgotten fragments of myself and personal anxieties. All the attempts at self-definition, all the trials and tribulations of gender identity follow one after another..."
– Maria Moira, Kyriakatiki Avgi – Readings"...The Woman has always been and will always be the most powerful symbol in society: the Virgin Mary, the Mother, the Grandmother. This is what Mary Mike uses in *Red Scars* to make us step, even just a little, into their shoes. However, these are not women we should pity; instead, they are presented as human beings, with strongly poetic elements. Some are more moving than others, but their defining feature is that, whether resigned or not, they are solitary fighters...”
– Vasilis Gretistas, Dreamers & Co."...The collection is distinguished by a rich, vivid, intensely incisive and dense language. Almost every sentence accumulates images, shapes the world, verbalises the small things that come together with other small things in a compact narrative. The language paints the passions of women, brings their pain to life, links them to exile or refugeehood, adds colour to their feelings, touches of colour to their bleak, voiceless fate, illuminates the harsh wind that sweeps them away..."
– Patriarch Photios, Book Café"...a weaver of souls, the author of Red Scars knows well how to handle both the warp and the weft of her narrative, weaving patterns that reverently conceal the intertextual layers of the thread and its theoretical knot, anchoring her motifs with knots of History well hidden within the weave; and weaving boldly and firmly, without hesitation or stiffness, her ‘little stories’ to narrate the history of the suffering female body and to provoke the inner tremors that only good literature knows how to provoke but also to heal..."
– Katerina Kostiu, Chronos magazineMary Mike
Mary Mike is a professor of Modern Greek Literature in the Department of Philology at Aristotle University of Thessaloniki.
She has written the books: The literary journal O Kyklos (1931–1939, 1945–1947), PhD thesis, Department of Philology, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki 1988 ~ Nikos Kavvadias’s The Watch. Illustrations and Transformations, Agra 1994 ~ Melpo Axioti. Critical Wanderings, Kedros 1996 ~ Melpo Axioti, Poems (ed.), Kedros 2001 ~ Disguises in Modern Greek Prose (19th–20th Cent.), Kedros 2001 ~ Eros (ant.) National. Erotic Desire and National Identity in the 19th Century, Polis 2007 ~ Correspondence between Nikos Kavvadias and M. Karagatsis (introduction, editing, commentary), Agra 2010 ~ A Harmonious Blend. Essays on Prose, Agra 2012 and has co-edited the volumes The Word of Presence. A Festschrift for Pan. Moulis, Sokolis 2005 ~ Palimpsest of Kavala. An Anthology of Post-War Literary Texts. Introduction, editing, anthology, Kavala Municipal Library – Kastaniotis 2009 ~ Anastasios Drivas, The Works, Kostas and Eleni Ourani Foundation 2012 ~ G.M. Vizyinos, On the Paths of Scholarship. Texts on Knowledge, Theory and Criticism, Selected Works – Commentary, MIET 2013 ~ Melpo Axioti, République-Bastille, Introduction and editing, Agra 2014 ~ Melpo Axioti, République-Bastille, Edited by www.lit.auth.gr/archive/axioti_r.-bastille
Her studies, articles and essays have been published in academic journals, anthologies and conference proceedings.
Her interests centre on the history, theory and criticism of prose texts, primarily from the 19th and 20th centuries.
