THE SLEEPWALKER

On a Greek island where writers and painters gather, a new messiah sent down by a bored and bitterly disappointed God introduces mayhem to set straight the "small and ridiculous" beings who put pleasure and beauty above Law.

Originally published in 1985, but available in English only now, Karapanou's second novel (following Kassandra and the Wolf, 1974) helped establish her as one of Greece's most admired postmodernists. The author, who died in 2008, also established herself with these books as one of the most wicked and unsparing observers of modern life. Her artist characters are all suffering to begin with, bogged down in unfinished or unrealized works and lost in unfulfilling relationships. A painter is able to turn out only headless figures. A novelist who is too self-absorbed to enter his characters imagines "a violent death that might put me, just for a second, into the state you need to be in if you're going to write." His fantasy is realized. When the messiah, a cop named Manolis, takes his place among them, all charm and comfort on the surface but with devilish aims inside him, dark forces sweep through the community, leading to rape and murder and disappearances. Part crime novel, part satire, part metafiction, part phantasmagoria, the book is anything but somnambulant. Karapanou writes with a headlong intensity, maintaining a jaundiced but playful tone even when the violence is at its most shocking. There's a kind of centrifugal force at work, pulling the large cast of characters helplessly toward a heart of darkness. 

An absurdist tour de force about lost souls and a lost deity by a criminally neglected Greek novelist.