Here are our thoughts on books we have read, leaving comments open, so that for each book presented an open group of commentators for the book emerges. Shortness and dialogue are desirable.
Presentation of MoMa’s Writing Club on Friday 26 July 2024. Words: Anastasia Karavasileiou Participating in the Writing Club of MoMa (the Museum of Modern Art in New York), I felt a part of a global creative community. I felt free to express myself. The mindfulness practice at the beginning of…
Achieving the joke is a rare gift or a special talent for combining contradictions. In literature this ability seems to be even rarer, but Sedaris has it uninterruptedly for decades now. He has cultivated in many ways his talent for drawing humor from unexpectable sources. In fact, his sharpness and…
How we can call the distance between two points? Absence-distance-waiting. In this period Zama lives, passing from the historical to the eternal time, passing from the void to the existence, passing from the loss of egoism to death and to the rebirth of the self. While waiting to be relocated…
Memory is the core. Historical memory, lived memory and collective experience, biological memory and its loss. Memory is also the web of narration. It spreads in the form of a short treatise, a collective narrative transmitted by the elder women, personal thoughts recorded as a diary. Thus, every evolution in…
The first-person narrative does not let us see behind the external impression. The facts just happen and the heroine lives her life as an observer. People just pass. Emotions are unexpressed. The light never ends, the darkness promising a chance for breather is coming slow. Teenage Bianca and her brother…
Rilke’s god is different from what we are used to. The roots of this god are deeply rooted in the souls of children, to whom fairy tales are addressed. But the narrator does not tell them directly to the children. He delivers them to the adults, so that they can…
The alternation of seasons seems hidden from the screens and theories about climate change. Mostly, however, it hides behind the beasts, made of steel and cement. Everything does not seem to change. Like a heavy dusty curtain, modern technological civilization covers birth and decay, death and rebirth. The death of…
In his epimeter, James Woods describes Zeno as a Don Quixote of modernism. Everything he desires, everything he sees around him works inverted. Some imagine and some happen, some claim to do and some do. Who really is Zeno? The one who remembers himself or the one who corrects his…
Danilo Kis’ collection of short stories is as concentrated in meaning as a message in a bottle, which travels through time. Every story contains the world, like Borges’s Aleph or like a fractal, because it condenses the feeling and the thought of the one and only moment. And this moment…
The ancient peoples believed that things, animals and plants, everything around us, has its soul. The closer to the divine, the closer to nature. The same goes for Argyris Hionis, who has spiritual objects in front of him. His table and his stove, his cat and his dog have their…