Sotiropoulos’s Modernist Surfaces

At The Quarterly Conversation we’ve just published George Fragopoulos’s review of Landscape With Dog: And Other Stories by Ersi Sotiropoulos.

Landscape is a collection that I myself enjoyed this year, and I was pleased to see it make the Best Translated Book Award Longlist this year. Here’s aquote from George’s review:

There is in Sotiropoulos’s fiction a tendency to draw attention to its own naked surfaces, its almost flat prose, a Modernist ethos one can trace back to Cubism, or even further back to Oscar Wilde’s claim that only shallow people do not judge by appearances. In a Nietzschean sense of value reversal, surface is argued to be just as important as any supposed depth.
But these revelatory glimpses, it should be noted, are not of the sublime, metaphysical kind—there is a stark materialist streak in Sotiropoulos. Consider “The Exterminator,” a story about an unnamed writer on a Greek island looking for a semblance of serenity in which to write her book

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