extract from the review
The ancient world meets the 21th century. When Alcamenis says at the battle of Salamis that: “a trireme is coming in a hurry in the dark”, the reader lifts his eyes to see the trireme which seems to have escaped from the depths of centuries. So alive is the novel.
(…)
I keep in my hands one of the more beautiful novels that I have read. Maria L. Pothos has written a historical novel through an Orphic vision. Warriors who are ready to be sacrificed, are transformed at solar heros, at mortal gods. Her wandering starts from depths of the historic past, with the “Then and Now” to meet and to compose a magical present.
(…)
At the unrivaled poetic writing of M P the mortality is the way to surpass the measure of man.
Her hero says: “Today we will give what gods can not: our life”.
And when the time is coming to devour the History, her hero resists: “I am the fragment of eternity, and I contain the entire time” he says.
And when her Alkamenis is fighting at the naval battle of Salamis, he feels that he is identified with History, he says: “This moment will remain indelible, it will be engraved at the depth of the time and after two thousand years I will find it…”
(…)
And when another moment, as he was lost at the dance of blood and death, he says “I”, feels that it was an “I” collective, an “I” spartan, a piece of one huge, eternal “we”.
This novel of Maria Lampadaridou Pothou is built by the same eternal material as our soul.
written by the professor and poetess Zoe Samara
at the newspaper TO VIMA, 1 Juin, 2006
and “Themes of Literature” December 2007