An Andreas Karavis Companion - Softcover

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1550651323 ISBN 13: 9781550651324

Publisher: Véhicule Press, 2001

Synopsis

Rare book

About this title

About the Author:

David Solway is the author of many books of poetry including Modern Marriage, Bedrock, Saracen Island: The Poetry of Andreas Karavis, and Franklin's Passage, winner of the 2004 Le Grand Prix du Livre de Montréal. His most recent collection, The Pallikari of Nesmine Rifat, was published in 2005. Currently an associate editor with Books in Canada, he lives in Hudson, Quebec.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:

In the social sphere proper, Karavis would agree with Plato who, in a moment of political sanity, once defined democracy as the best of all the defective systems from which we are given to choose, but Karavis stays away from the political arena almost entirely, except at the polling booth. "I will vote for one party," he says, "as the most effective way of casting my vote against another." During the notorious regime of the Junta, he abandoned his home on Seriphos where he had come under suspicion as an intellectual and went into voluntary exile on Amorgos, remaining there inconspicuously for six years. (He refuses to speak about this period in his life, out of shame for his country, I suspect.) "I would never kill for a principle or a party," he told me once when we were discussing the Junta interregnum, "and I would fight only if physically attacked or to defend my family, if I had one. But then I would be merciless." As an afterthought, he added rhetorically: "And who was our greater enemy then, the Colonels or the pashas?"

About this edition

• Publisher: Véhicule Press
• Publication date: 2001
• ISBN 10: 1550651323
• ISBN 13: 9781550651324
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 120
• Editor: Solway David