Sleepwalker - A Novel by Margarita Karapanou
Winner of the Prix de meilleur livre étranger/Prize for the best foreign novel, France. At the opening of Margarita Karapanou’s stunning second novel, in disgust at mankind God vomits a new Messiah onto the earth. Or rather, onto a Greek island. Populated by villagers, ex-pats, artists, writers, this island is a Tower of Babel, a place where languages and individuals have been assembled, as though in wait for something as horrific and comic as this second coming. The Sleepwalker moves deftly and dizzyingly between genres—satire, murder mystery, magical realism, its own brand of Theater of the Absurd—following Manolis, the new Messiah, as he moves through this place and its characters like a sleepwalker, unaware to the very end of his divine nature. In The Sleepwalker Karapanou has created an unforgettable depiction of a dissolute world, desperately comic and full of compassion, a world in which nightmare and miracle both uneasily reside.
Winner of the Prix de meilleur livre étranger/Prize for the best foreign novel, France. At the opening of Margarita Karapanou’s stunning second novel, in disgust at mankind God vomits a new Messiah onto the earth. Or rather, onto a Greek island. Populated by villagers, ex-pats, artists, writers, this island is a Tower of Babel, a place where languages and individuals have been assembled, as though in wait for something as horrific and comic as this second coming. The Sleepwalker moves deftly and dizzyingly between genres—satire, murder mystery, magical realism, its own brand of Theater of the Absurd—following Manolis, the new Messiah, as he moves through this place and its characters like a sleepwalker, unaware to the very end of his divine nature. In The Sleepwalker Karapanou has created an unforgettable depiction of a dissolute world, desperately comic and full of compassion, a world in which nightmare and miracle both uneasily reside.
Winner of the Prix de meilleur livre étranger/Prize for the best foreign novel, France. At the opening of Margarita Karapanou’s stunning second novel, in disgust at mankind God vomits a new Messiah onto the earth. Or rather, onto a Greek island. Populated by villagers, ex-pats, artists, writers, this island is a Tower of Babel, a place where languages and individuals have been assembled, as though in wait for something as horrific and comic as this second coming. The Sleepwalker moves deftly and dizzyingly between genres—satire, murder mystery, magical realism, its own brand of Theater of the Absurd—following Manolis, the new Messiah, as he moves through this place and its characters like a sleepwalker, unaware to the very end of his divine nature. In The Sleepwalker Karapanou has created an unforgettable depiction of a dissolute world, desperately comic and full of compassion, a world in which nightmare and miracle both uneasily reside.
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Margarita Karapanou was born in Athens in 1946. One of Greece’s most beloved authors, she was the author of five novels. Her first novel, Kassandra and the Wolf, was translated into four languages, and was originally published in English by Harcourt Brace Jovanovich in 1974. The Sleepwalker has likewise been translated into four languages, and Karapanou’s own French translation of the book, Le Somnambule (Paris: Gallimard, 1987), won the French national prize for the best foreign novel, an honor previously awarded to Lawrence Durrell, Jorge Luis Borges, and Gabriel Garcia Marquez. She died in 2008.
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Publisher: Clockroot Books (September 1, 2010)
Length: 288 pages
ISBN13: 9781566568388
Printed in the USA
