The story is simple: a love affair ends badly. A woman and a man marry, then cruelty, infidelity, and divorce. But this novel tells their story twice, from opposing perspectives. Our sympathies are inverted; we don’t know whom to trust; the distinction between truth and deception blurs, and then seems simply to dissolve. The novel shifts deftly between endless oppositions: lover and beloved, angel and demon, master and slave, reader and writer. But inevitably both stories must arrive at the point of rien ne va plus: the moment in roulette when all bets are off and you either win or lose—the moment when the game becomes fate. Margarita Karapanou’s third novel is an extraordinary experience in fiction: devastating and brave and true.
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Margarita Karapanou
Margarita Karapanou was born in Athens in 1946. One of Greece’s most beloved authors, she was the author of five novels. Her first novel, Kassandra and the Wolf, was translated into four languages, and was originally published in English by Harcourt Brace Jovanovich in 1974. The Sleepwalker has likewise been translated into four languages, and Karapanou’s own French translation of the book, Le Somnambule (Paris: Gallimard, 1987), won the French national prize for the best foreign novel, an honor previously awarded to Lawrence Durrell, Jorge Luis Borges, and Gabriel Garcia Marquez. She died in 2008.
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