Either Side of the Barbed-Wire Border

Maria Margaronis

  • May Your Name Be Blessed by Sotiris Dimitriou, translated by Leo Marshall
    Centre for Byzantine, Ottoman and Modern Greek Studies, University of Birmingham, 84 pp, £8.00, May 2000, ISBN 0 7044 2189 5

Sotiris Dimitriou is best known in Greece as a writer of compact, sometimes brutal stories about people pushed aside by modern life. Distracted by obsessions and false hopes, his migrants, rent boys and heartbroken mothers are unaware of the forces that derail their lives. They might find momentary pleasure in a song, or in fragmented memories of the countryside – ‘meadows, daisies, nights and sweet eyes, dreams of youth, dim winters, old griefs, lost suns’ – but nostalgia for village life is only a trick of the trap that holds them.

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