clockroot books
Winner of the Prix de meilleur livre étranger
Prize for the best foreign novel, France
Margarita Karapanou leads us into the labyrinth where God
lives. One must read her as one reads Rimbaud or Blake…
Karapanou’s insistence on tearing off our everyday clothes
and ridiculous masks makes her, indeed, a truly
remarkable writer.
—Jerome Charyn, Le Monde
The Sleepwalker
by Margarita Karapanou
translated by Karen Emmerich
“God was tired… He looked down at his earth and what it had become… His people had betrayed him… Thus it was that he decided to send a new god to earth, a god people would recognize and worship from the start—a god made in their image, a god they deserved… He clutched his stomach, leaned over the earth, and vomited.”Vomited onto a Greek island. The island, a microcosm of contemporary Greece and contemporary civilization as a whole, is a Tower of Babel where languages and individuals come together and clash. Manolis, the new Messiah, moves through this place like a sleepwalker, unaware to the very end of his divine nature. Like sleepwalkers, too, move the other characters. Karapanou’s depiction of our dissolute world is both sharply, desperately comic and full of compassion.
forthcoming Spring 2010
excerpt on Words Without Borders
other books by Karapanou