Either Side of the Barbed-Wire Border 

Maria Margaronis

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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