‘I’ll sell you my spleen,’ says Emma to San, and so begins a chain of strange transactions between the young unemployed woman and the eccentric junk dealer who is interested not in washing machines but in the diaries and love letters of the woman who invites him into her home. Whilst he buys more pieces of her body, she reveals to him the peculiar relationship she had developed with L.R. and how the latter wanted to rebuild her body.
How do you deconstruct another person to reach their core?
Can you buy their wisdom, and at what price?
Can a lollipop serve as monetary compensation?
Do flying plants exist? How is a heart sold?
Have you read pages from Mr P.’s diary?
Has an apple ever got stuck in your throat?
- Pages: 192
- ISBN: 978-960-572-216-6
- Publication: 2018
- Date of publication: 07/03/2018
- Dimensions: 13,3 x 20,5 εκ.
- Categories: Literature, Books, Greek Literature
"...reading *The End of Hunger* is like stepping onto a carousel, where unpredictable moods, enchanting myth and sly lyricism sit, and the whirlwind does not stop until you reach the serene conclusion."
– Alexandros Stergiopoulos, The Magazine"...Narrative skill and a disarming story in journalist Lina Rokou’s literary debut."
– Angeliki Birbili, Athens Voice"...Taking this strange relationship between two people as her starting point, Lina Rokou weaves the protagonist’s story, allegorically describing the difficulties of giving, of giving oneself, and of forming bonds."
– Theodora Loukanari, artharbour.gr"...The author does not hesitate to delve deeply and boldly into the mechanisms of erotic desire, crafting, right up to the open ending, a memorial reconstruction of the erotic history of the heroine’s body, beginning with the first childhood discovery and construction of gender and the self."
– Pelli Mastromina, Unfollow"...In her first novel, Lina Rokou succeeds in making the reader a participant and witness to her protagonist’s troubled situation, bringing her close to us and allowing us to feel absolute compassion for her, without, however, resorting to pity for her emotional anguish. Even when Emma realises that her body is a mobile treasure trove and may be what secures her livelihood—at the risk, of course, of her physical integrity— she, now fearless and staunchly defending her goal, proceeds to sell off her dignity, resorts to every possible plan to sell her organs, and when the junk dealer San rules it out—because he doesn’t need kidneys, for example—she is perplexed, resents it and ponders her next ‘clever’ move."
– Yannis Antoniadis, Bookfeed.gr"...The unemployed and impoverished Emma and the young and handsome rag-and-bone man San live out a bizarre love story, a carnivorous romance full of exchanges, symbolism and poetic imagery. Lina Rokou makes her literary debut with their story, one of the most surreal first books we have read recently."
– Anastasia Kamvisi, Marie Claire
"...Lina Rokou writes a novel with a strangely realistic and paradoxically fantastical plot, yet as the reader progresses, they will recognise in it aspects of every relationship they have formed in their own life. Love and its pleasures, their hidden desires, their despair and boredom, the fluctuations of passion and love, the intensity of presence and the terror of absence, the beginning and the end of existential hunger."
– Charalambos Giannakopoulos, Andro.grLina Rokou
Lina Rokou was born in Athens but grew up in Corfu. She studied at the Department of Communication, Media and Culture at Panteion University. She works as a journalist at popaganda.gr. The End of Hunger is her first published book. Her most significant influences are Corfu and that episode of The Pink Panther in which a vacuum cleaner sucked up everything, even itself.
