"The High Art of Failure": Vangelis Raptopoulos in the first person

By Yannis Farsaris. Published on www.artmag.gr, 26/03/2012 Vangelis Raptopoulos is one of the most important contemporary Greek prose writers, with 23 works to his name. Detailed information about the author and his work can be found on his blog. His latest book, entitled ‘The High Art of Failure’, was published a few days ago by Ikaros Publications. Vangelis Raptopoulos writes in the first person about the story behind his book: “The High Art of Failure” is a cross between a diary, an autobiography, a confessional essay, a chronicle, a report, documentary, testimony, travelogue, dictionary and panorama of the 2000s. Let us take the first version, to which we can easily add not only the above, but also many others: the diary. In this case, we are not dealing with a conventional form of it, but with the diary in a broader sense. A kind of ‘public’ diary.The diary, in the sense of a confessional essay, a spiritual self-portrait or autobiography of a writer who, as the living conscience of his generation and era, writes de facto public texts, even when these are private.Had Dostoevsky not already claimed it, I would have titled it ‘A Writer’s Diary’.***We are talking about a book that has, above all, a political and social dimension, through which we witness life in Greece changing towards the more nouveau riche and European, real or pretended, until it is ultimately led down the path of collapse.But, at the same time, we are also talking about the working diary of a writer who constantly reflects on his work, and above all on its relationship with the spirit of our times, whilst at the same time offering testimonies about his colleagues, from Tachtsis to Samarakis and Koumantareas, right down to the much younger generation.We are talking, in a manner of speaking, of a journalistic journey through the landscape of the last decade, and at the same time of highly personal material, which nevertheless constantly tends towards generalisation, since a writer’s reflection inevitably operates in precisely this way.***If I were asked who this book is aimed at, I would naturally overlook my peers or those older than me. And I would go straight to the much younger generation, to all those who essentially did not live through, or did not fully understand, the decade covered by *The High Art of Failure*.To the younger generation, then, this detailed diary or written documentary will provide the necessary keys to understanding what was happening, in a way entirely different from that of news journalism, precisely because of my personal obsessions, through which the events and people are filtered.And in any case, for those who were absent from the 2000s as well as those who were present, it will offer an intuitive insight, peculiarly penetrating, aiming not so much to recreate the era as to summarise something of its deepest core, always under the guise of the topical.