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The spring 2010 Review of Contemporary Fiction on Kassandra and the Wolf and Rien ne va plus:

“To read these two experimental works is to realize the magnitude of the loss when Greek novelist Margarita Karapanou died quite suddenly in 2008. Kassandra offers a disturbing portrait of childhood. A six year old girl, a stutterer, is victimized by sexual abuse she cannot begin to fathom, her vocabulary drawn from the lurid imagery of fairy tales (the wolf). So brutalized, Kassandra cannot express emotions: given a doll to love, she cuts off its legs and arms; given a kitten to tend, she beats it, drowns it, and then lovingly wraps it in a blanket. The novel disquiets, un-eases, disturbs, but intrigues. There is a coolness to its execution, Karapanou’s testing of the limited perceptions of an emotionally damaged child who cannot speak for herself compels focus less on harrowing events and more on their translation into lyric story. The same is true of the later work, Rien ne va plus. Karapanou executes a deft experiment that suspends events between experience and their redesign into fiction. A passionate woman marries a gay veterinarian, falls precipitously out of love with him, samples the ‘exotic’ spell of a lesbian relationship, and ultimately returns to her husband only to abort the child they conceive—well, maybe. Karapanou also works in, in an intriguing contrapuntal fashion, the story of a woman, a novelist, finishing a manuscript that renegotiates the reality of her own failed marriage by conceiving it as the freighted allegory of a woman who marries a gay vet, who falls precipitously out of love with him, etc. Which story is ‘the’ story—the creation of a soon-to-be-published manuscript or the collapse of a relationship? Like Kassandra, the narrative is harrowing in its implications but cool to the touch, audacious in its uncompromising commitment to test the integrity of narrative itself. The title—the last call at a roulette table signaling the players are ready to hand their fortunes over to fate—reminds Karapanou’s reader of the privilege of narrative: rendering brutal event into elegant design.” —Review of Contemporary Fiction, Joseph Dewey

In Rain Taxi’s spring online edition, check out the review of Margarita Karapanou’s Kassandra and the Wolf and Rien ne va plus.

… [R]eaders will also be delighted by what grounds Kassandra and the Wolf: Karapanou’s language. The word-pictures kaleidoscope—at times literally, as dinner becomes after-dinner games becomes Kassandra running down the stairs to demand of the housekeeper stories from the Greek Civil War—and at other times metaphorically (“A word like a snake stares at me: there’s a pot like Grandmother’s chamber pot, a mouth in the middle, and next to a nail scissors. . . . At the tail there’s a ladder. I count the scribbles, examine them closely. I like this word.”) In still more places, Karapanou pulls off being both literal and metaphorical at once: “I’m alone again. I stick my tongue out vaguely at Miss Benbridge because she’s driven away my friends and lovely pictures. I act the ape at her, the Chinaman, and then the frog. In a picture, I cover her in dung, turn her into a horsefly and a cockroach, and, finally, I turn her into a water glass, which I throw out of the window.”

Read in full here—

Please join us!

On Tuesday, February 9th, Ersi Sotiropoulos will read from Landscape with Dog and Other Stories with translator Karen Emmerich, at the Gallatin School at NYU. The reading is at 6, reception and signing at 7. For more information and location, see here.

On Thursday, February 11th, Book Culture and Columbia University’s Hellenic studies program will host a reading and discussion with Karen, Ersi, and professor Karen Van Dyck, celebrating Clockroot’s three new translations from the Greek: Landscape with Dog, and Margarita Karapanou’s Rien ne va plus and Kassandra and the Wolf. 6:30 pm, at 536 West 112th St (between Broadway & Amsterdam), NYC—see here.

And up in our neck of the woods, artist Ihrie Means—whose fantastic paintings are the cover art for Kassandra and the Wolf and Rien ne va plus—has an opening at the Cummington Community House, Saturday, February 13, 6 to 9 pm.

The January issue of the exciting new review venue Critical Flame brings George Fragopoulos’s fascinating essay on Margarita Karapanou, considering Kassandra and the Wolf, Rien ne va plus, and (forthcoming next fall from Clockroot!) The Sleepwalker.

Karapanou’s work then gives the impression of being constantly in motion, an active critique, perhaps, of Nietzsche’s claim that we need to read slower. When reading Karapanou one cannot read quickly enough. There is a velocity to her texts, both in the obvious sense of their structure and pacing as well as a visceral sense akin to vertigo. They seem always to be spinning wildly and recklessly towards unknown destinations (often that destination is death) or, rather, they seem to emphatically evade any firm lodging or easy comfort. Rien ne va Plus is a prime example, a novel that asks us, after a certain point, to return to its beginning and to question everything we have just read. Karapanou knew, as Deleuze did, that flight was by no means a passive activity, but rather the complete antithesis of passivity; that, in the wake of escaping, art could follow.

Read the full here—