Novel
Eroica
Ερόικα
Kosmas Politis · 1938
Synopsis
In a seaside town that is never named, a band of Greek and Italian adolescents choose a leader, Loïzos, and give themselves rites and challenges. Around Monica, the daughter of the Italian consul, Loïzos and his friend Alekos unknowingly re-enact the quarrels of the ancient heroes, and discover love together. The narrator, now an adult, already knows that this season will not return.
Context
The book was written in Patras and appeared in 1938, eight years after its author's first novel. The narrative is carried by an adult narrator who looks back on one season of his adolescence, and whose voice remembers more than it recounts; beneath the chronicle of the group the epic shows through, with Loïzos recalling Achilles and Monica Helen. Michel Cacoyannis made a film from it in 1960, shown in Berlin. Henri Tonnet translated it into French for the éditions du Griot in 1992, then for Ginkgo in 2012; Michel Volkovitch published the same author's Avant que la ville brûle in 2016.
Who it is for
A novel of about two hundred and fifty pages in the French edition, available in French since 1992; it can be read without prior knowledge.
Prizes and reception
He shared the State Prize for the novel in 1939 with Menelaos Loudemis, and with Στου Χατζηφράγκου, his novel of Smyrna, it remains the author's most characteristic work.