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Title	:	Η φόνισσα
Author	:	Alexandros Papadiamantis
Book Format	:	Hardcover
Book Edition	:	Deluxe Edition
Pages	:	Pages: 200 pages
Published	:	2001 by Βιβλιοπωλείον της Εστίας (first published January 15th 1903)
Categories	:	Fiction. Classics. Cultural. Greece. Literature

Η φόνισσα

Alexandros Papadiamantis

Hardcover | Pages: 200 pages

Rating: 4.22 | 3817 Users | 202 Reviews

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When I learned that C.P. Cavafy and Odysseus Elytis both admired the prose of Alexandros Papadiamantis (1851-1911), I knew I had to read some of his work. Advised that his shorter pieces are much better than his novels, I read the collection Tales From a Greek Island and then the novella The Murderess, held to be his best work.

In light of Elytis' leftist leanings, I was more than a little surprised to find that Papadiamantis was a religious reactionary, who objected to the emancipation of women and bewailed democracy and other European habits as unsuitable for the Greeks. In one of his stories he appears to regret that Greek women no longer wore veils, which they had been obliged to do under the Ottoman occupation. Nonetheless, he was no misogynist; he was well aware of the complete lack of freedom of women in 19th century Greece, and he portrayed this fact in many of his stories with complete sympathy for the women, who quite often are the main characters.(*) And he was no elitist - his stories are generally set in the lowest economic strata.

Since he was so conservative, it was not surprising to find that he wrote much of his work in the antiquarian katharevousa Greek, which harkens back to the Greek spoken in Athens in the 4th century BCE, though apparently he leavened it with his own idiosyncratic diction. In his dialogues, however, he used contemporary colloquial speech, even dialect when appropriate. The translator, Elizabeth Constantinides, of Tales From a Greek Island assures us that his diction is completely unique and that a page of his prose can be immediately identified. Unfortunately, there is nothing linguistically notable about her translations, just a very few half-hearted gestures towards slang in some of the dialogue. Nonetheless, something else does come through - a combination of empathy, watchfulness, and relaxed patience - which I have not encountered before.

The short stories in Tales are set on the island of Skiathos, where Papadiamantis was born and raised, and with empathetic, if sometimes sardonic humor provide a rather grim picture of 19th century Greek island life. Though Papadiamantis never married, nearly all of these stories revolve around marriage, one way or another.(**) If not about marriage in the offing - the dream of a marriage - or about a marriage being lived, then about the onerous dowries families needed to pay to marry off their daughters(***) and the extremes to which this custom forced them to go, such as marrying their daughters to extremely unsuitable men in order to reduce the dowry, or waiting 20 years for a son to return from America with enough money to allow his younger sister to marry. Just two of many.

Inevitable consequences of this custom are the regret and resentment parents experienced when a daughter was born. Needless to say, in some parents this found rather extreme expression - murder; or, if not murder, then murder just barely averted, stayed in the last moment, as evidenced in this collection.

But in The Murderess (1903), one strides directly to multiple murder. With such a title I am hardly spoiling the story if I reveal that a grandmother, a herbalist and healer by trade, again on the isle of Skiathos, reviews her harsh life and the prospects of her daughter and newly born, sickly granddaughter and decides that girls would be better off dead.(****) Remarkably, Papadiamantis is able to make this most unappealing premise into a powerful little book by combining Raskolnikovian self-laceration with a touch of Medean madness in the idyllic setting of an Aegean island and using finely judged flashbacks to fill in background and change the pace and mood. Very nicely done all around.

I share now Cavafy's and Elytis' admiration for Papadiamantis' work, but it is high time to leave behind the sad and claustrophobic society of 19th century Skiathos. Aποχαιρετιστήριος !

(*) In The Murderess all the main characters are women, while the men are jokes or monsters.

(**) At this time, in this place - a small island where everyone knew everybody's business - marriage was the only possibility for a man and woman to ease their passion. With all of the narrow minded busybodies poring over other people's lives, even the innocent were in trouble...

(***) In one story the parents of the bride signed over to the groom their house and furnishings and paid cash! In another, the family signed over half their property and mortgaged the rest to provide cash.

(****) Her parents solved the dowry problem by marrying her off to a simpleton who was satisfied with a perfectly worthless dowry...

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Itemize Books In Favor Of Η φόνισσα

Original Title:	Η φόνισσα
ISBN:	9600509379 (ISBN13: 9789600509373)
Edition Language:	Greek, Modern (1453-)
Setting:	Skiathos(Greece) Greece

Rating Appertaining To Books Η φόνισσα

Ratings: 4.22 From 3817 Users | 202 Reviews

Criticize Appertaining To Books Η φόνισσα

When I learned that C.P. Cavafy and Odysseus Elytis both admired the prose of Alexandros Papadiamantis (1851-1911), I knew I had to read some of his work. Advised that his shorter pieces are much better than his novels, I read the collection Tales From a Greek Island and then the novella The Murderess, held to be his best work. In light of Elytis' leftist leanings, I was more than a little surprised to find that Papadiamantis was a religious reactionary, who objected to the emancipation of women

A perfect tragedy. A powerful treatise on social injustice. An obituary to a demented, tragic, victimised, unhopeful murderess in order to lend her a sympathetic ear.

First of all, thank you to my book club for introducing me to this amazing book. Without them I wouldn't have known about Alexandros Papadiamantis' "The Murderess." Despite teh interesting book summary, I was hesitant to read this book based on the many good reviews. Sometimes when a book has a lot of good reviews, I feel under pressure to like it and then end up disliking it a lot more (Salman Rushdie's "Midnight's Children" springs to mind). However, I was pleasantly surprised with "The

This is a charming little tale of a mother smothering and drowning babies, a mad brother stabbing his sister, and Harrison Ford-style adventures on Greek cliff-faces looking onto crashing death-waves below. Mr. Papadiamantis serves us a moral fable with oodles of suspense and terror, weaving a folky classical Greek yarn around a desperate on-the-run action narrative, told slowly and elegantly, with vitality and astonishment. Sublime little 19thC novella.

I liked it. Great descriptive writing, and an oddly creepy story that was hard to put down. This book is probably not at your local county library though.

Stark and poetic, reads like a myth.

Alexandros Papadiamantis (1851-1911), known as the "saint of modern Greek literature", was born on Skiathos, an isolated and provincial Aegean island which provided the setting for several of his most highly regarded works. These works are short stories and novellas that describe country life on the island; he also wrote about urban life in Athens, where he moved to as a young man. Papadiamantis was a deeply religious man who never married, and he returned to Skiathos two years before his death.