A former dissident during the junta era in Greece, he was arrested and severely tortured by the military police (the notorious ESA). Kostis, a retired journalist-translator, refuses to talk about his past. Recipient of the Constantinides Memorial Translation Prize awarded by the Modern Greek Studies Association (USA)
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It seems, like the moon in Mariambas, to be mostly half full and therein lies tragedy, but also comedy, enough. For Skarimbas life is too complicated, has woven into it too many incongruous strands, ever simply to seem empty. With its complicated chronology, its interlocking embedded narratives, its shifts of register and narrative perspective, its stylistic pastiches and parodies, its plot mechanism as intricate, as funny and distressing, as a Feydeau farce, it subverts the tragic coherence of life in nineteenth century fiction. Mariambasis an account of the events leading up to a suicide, but one quite consciously unlike any in the great novels of the nineteenth century: Mysteries, Madame Bovary, Anna Karenina. Skarimbas's voice is unique in European fiction, as unique and inimitable as Laurence Sterne's. Recipient of Greek State Literary Translation Prize While the narrative affects the sobriety of scholarly discourse, it violates the basic tenets of historiography with varying degrees of subtlety, as if to strike a blow for the recognition of historical memory as a function of the creative imagination. The Last Varlamis is an entertaining and richly nuanced tale of opportunism, lust, brutality and artistic creativity spun upon the frame of selected scenes of modern Greek history.
His construction of a trajectory for the fabled bloodline from the first to the eponymous last Varlamis is a bravura performance of his trademark 'faction', an unsettling hybrid of fiction and what passes for historical fact. Thanasis Valtinos is clearly in his artistic element using such raw ingredients. The name 'Varlamis' summons forth a shadowy figure from the margins of modern Greek history - the curiously recumbent protagonist of a brigand ballad of dubious authenticity.