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Title: A pretentious exercise
Review: The apparently gormless Photi is the subject of Flokos' "romance." (This is apparently between - take your pick - Photi and the Winged Victory of Samothrace, his Mother, and "Mother," an Amerikana, who returns to create a documentary about the pillaging of the statue by a French antiquarian in the nineteenth century.) Photi wants to bring his ikon back to the island: it means so much to him. (Apparently, too, he wants his dead mother back.) Heavy-handed, half-baked, this book suggests that it is the product of a Katzanzakis wannabe. The skein of male-female relationships focussed on Photi is so heavily Oedipal and really psychologically unrealized that even the lighthearted touches (the village as narrator) are dragged down. Read Katzanzakis. Don't bother with this.
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