The setting of the narrative is the base of the 7th Armoured Brigade, during the years of the dictatorship, where Colonel Stamatis Xirias (also known as ‘Gorillas’) suddenly surrounds the camp with tanks and makes demands of the President. The Revolutionary Council convenes urgently and the snake is called upon to slither out of its hole – who else! – Lieutenant Colonel Achilleas Makavettas, who arrives in Karditsa for this very purpose at the head of a small team of elite soldiers.
Questions abound: what is Makavettas’s half-paralysed sister, Eurycleia, trying to eavesdrop on behind the closed doors of the rooms at the ‘Asteria’ hotel? What role does the young starlet Zeza Fili, leading lady of Greek-American John Hector’s “national” blockbusters, actually play? What motives drive the mysterious Captains Zivos, Bountova and Christopoulos, and who, ultimately, make up the notorious ‘phantom organisation’ of the Zealots? New faces have joined the cast of the drama, and the game of power will be played out on an open stage.
Author:
Apostolos Doxiadis
Pages:
256
ISBN:
978-960-8399-91-4
Publication:
1988
Categories:
Literature, Books, Greek Literature
Apostolos Doxiadis
Apostolos Doxiadis was born in Australia to Greek parents and grew up in Athens. He studied mathematics at Columbia University in New York and continued his postgraduate studies in Paris. Returning to Greece, he directed for the theatre and cinema. His second feature film, Terirem, won the International Confederation of Art Cinemas Award at the Berlin Film Festival in 1988.
He wrote the short stories Parallel Life (Agra, 1985), Makavettas (Estia, 1988, revised edition Ikaros, 2010), Uncle Peter and Goldbach’s Conjecture (Kastaniotis, 1993, revised edition 2001), The Three Little Men (Kastaniotis, 1998), as well as the play The Seventeenth Night, which was published alongside the essay From Insanity to Algorithms in the book of the same title (Ikaros, 2006).
In 2008, Ikaros published the highly successful graphic novel Logicomix, in collaboration with Christos Papadimitriou, Alekos Papadatos, and Annie Di Donna, following five years of work. The book, which was first published in Greek, received rave reviews from readers and critics alike, and was soon followed by its publication in 22 countries around the world, turning it into a publishing phenomenon.
