"Let's just say that Giacometti was setting out to draw a face. If he
started with the chin, he would worry that he might never reach the
nose. The longer he sketched the face, the harder he tried to offer a
faithful representation of it, the more it resembled a skull. The only
thing left was the gaze. So what he ended up drawing was a skull with a
gaze." Landscape with Dog and Other Stories is made up of countless such
moments: transformations of the everyday, encounters between the known
and the unknowable. Contemporary Athens wavers before us; the outlines
of a sketch darken and blur; the face of a friend is at once beloved and
strange. In Ersi Sotiropoulos's prose, the slightest event, the
slightest change in the quality of the light, can alter everything.
Karen Emmerich brings perfectly into English the precise, vibrant
movement of Sotiropoulos's language, the mastery that has made her one
of Greece's most acclaimed writers. These stories will be praised for
their flashes of beauty and their crackles of dark humor, but what makes
them so memorable is something else, impossible to pin down, something
like the gaze of the skull. At once familiar and troubling, compelling
and unapproachable, Sotiropoulos's stories give us a new way of seeing.
