clockroot books
In Taming the Beast, Ersi Sotiropoulos’s protagonist embarks
on a journey to Spain, which signals the beginning of a
series of major reversals in his life. The novelist holds up a
mirror of our times… everyone couples with everyone else…
Television reality seems more substantial than the characters’
insubstantial lives… The result is a
contemporary psychological
thriller, pure and simple. And it is the novelist’s mastery that
makes it come alive.
—Eleni Gkika, Ethnos
Taming the Beast
by Ersi Sotiropoulos
translated by
Aris Pavlopoulos, special advisor to a government minister, former leftist, is returning home in his official car after a meeting with his lover when he realizes that a decrepit Peugeot driven by a young man he’s never seen before is pursuing him. The car hits him, then disappears into the night.Pavlopoulos is unwittingly entangled in the mystery of this chase, the first in a series of events that will turn his life upside-down. His is a life of relative ease, seemingly conventional, which has up to now kept hidden its darker folds: Pavlopoulos’s obsession with sex and his repressed ambition to gain fame as a poet.
A poetry reading dedicated to his work and a trip to Spain, haunted by the sexual symbolism of the bullfight, promise to afford him opportunities to realize his desires. But chance keeps turning on Pavlopoulos, sense being replaced by the absurd: the cripple who begs near his office isn’t a cripple, his friend the minister may be an enemy, the bribe he accepts is only a joke, his masterpiece of a poem ridiculous. Nothing is what it seems in Athens.
As in Ersi Sotiropoulos’s previous novels, the protagonist traverses a city that isn’t just an urban landscape, but the site of internal anguish, unsettled debts, fallen passions. Sotiropoulos minutely examines the conduct of an elite, sacrificing neither rigor nor humor, irony nor tragedy, suspense nor lyricism—her signature precision and innovation create a masterwork in Taming the Beast.
forthcoming Fall 2010
other books by SotiropoulosZigzag through the Bitter Orange Trees