Antonis Karvelas

As I was going through the book, it suddenly dawned on me that I'm dealing with a writer of extreme intelligence, wit and understanding who at the same time is completely unapologetic for her craft. I've dealt with clever writers in the past, but never in so condensed a form. Her ever flowing stream of consciousness presents thoughts and feelings of various characters, never taking sides, never judging, never blaming. You would expect her to wholeheartedly support her protagonist and blame men for everything that has happened to her but instead she is objective, she presents Mrs. Dalloway's weaknesses and the choices she made willingly while at the same time presenting most beautifully and painfully Septimus's shell shock symptoms (in a time that many still considered men with these symptoms simply cowards). When I read the first sentence I just wanted to touch a bit of another famous writer but by the time I was reading the last sentence I was certain that I want to return in the future and follow Woolf's rivers of words in her other works.

The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco is probably the greatest work of historical fiction set in Medieval Europe, and if that sometimes makes it difficult, pedantic, overly symbolic and a dragging theological treatise, either learn to deal with it and even enjoy it, or else forever abandon this extremely interesting but deathly hostile period and place. As a history enthusiast, popular media always disappoint me with their grim image of the past, the Dark Ages being quite literally dark and dirty, the average peasant having shit smeared on his face. The truth is very different. Bright colors were universally loved, churches were still decorated with extremely detailed Orthodox style, not to mention that people outside great cities actually bathed because they thought diseases were transmitted through scent. It was a time of constant geopolitical changes, of actual progress in many fields, but also of great spiritual stagnation. The darkness was spreading in the hearts and minds of men and women, forever looking at the ground and interpreting everything through the lenses of Scripture, always awaiting an Apocalypse that would never come.
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