Little Infamies: Stories

by Panos Karnezis

Book Overview

In a nameless Greek village, the lives of its citizens--the priest, the whore, the doctor, the seamstress, the mayor--and even its animals--a centaur, a parrot that recites Homer, a horse called History--are entwined. As their lives intersect, their hidden crimes, their little infamies, are revealed, in a place full of passion, cruelty, and deep reserves of black humor.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0374189374
• ISBN13: 9780374189372
• Release Date: February 2003
• Publisher: Farrar Straus Giroux
• Length: 296 Pages
• Weight: 1.05 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.0" x 5.8" x 8.3"

Customer Reviews

An explosive imagination

I once heard a story about a southern writer -- may have been Flannery O'Connor or Eudora Welty -- who, in response to a foolish complaint that her stories contained far too many freaks and monsters, declared that this was because in the South they can still tell a freak when they see one. This book by Panos Karnezis not only recognizes freaks and monsters but also tries to explore what makes them what they are, thus bringing out the beeauty of their basic humanity as well as their brokenness. This exploration is enormously, sometimes shockingly successful as the author unleashes his expansive, explosive imagination on a Greek town so poor it doesn't even have a name. He involves all the reader's senses, even smell and touch, to describe how his characters make what seem to them reasonable moral decisions and lay out what they consider logical plans for the future they will never have. Their reason and logic is of course the ethos of poverty and ignorance, which is what largely characterizes their existence. The reading public has reason to celebrate Karnezis's arrival on the literary scene. As I understand it, he is still under forty. Good grief.

Wonderful short stories

These strikingly original short stories are set in a small village in Greece, "so poor it doesn't have a name". They are extraordinary: shocking, colourful, amusing, resonant and sometimes tragic. Although Panos Karnezis writes in his second language, his style is fresh and lyrical and he has enriched and subverted English making it into a delight to read. He has created unforgettable characters and has cast a sharp eye on contemporary Greece. He is a master of the genre, like James Joyce, Raymond Carver or Guy de Maupassant.

Hard Life

No slacker, Karnezeis packs 19 stories into this small, 281-page book. The stories are set in a Greek village in the 1950's. Although it contains less than 40 houses, and thus is about to be deprived of official existence, it contains an amazing assortment of personalities, from spinster to prostitute, from priest to thief to pimp. Each has his own hopes and fears. All must cope with an earthquake, a drought and the obliteration of the village by a new dam and reservoir. As many authors, Karnezeis has trouble with endings, sometimes leaving the reader to guess at them and sometimes lacking credibility. Not a native speaker of English, the author muffs a few idioms, as when a character stands on her heels to reach an object overhead. Nevertheless, the work is fascinating and absorbing.