photo by Johanna Weber

"...this epistolary novel of exquisite lyricism and profound pain about a Greek intellectual's burden, one that has been often examined by such other twentieth-century Greek writers as George Seferis and Odysseus Elytis: to be Greek is to feel always responsible for the country's political existence and history.
Very much like Toni Morrison's Beloved, I Shall Sign as Loui is a poetic journey through memory and loss, in the sense that the central character, a writer, has to explore his people's history and carve his own place in it." (A. P. Dragona)
 
RHEA GALANAKI

I SHALL SIGN AS LOUI

NOVEL (232 pages, 17.5X12 cm.)
 

It is Christmas Eve 1888, and the poet-revolutionary Andreas Rigopoulos (1821-89) is writing to an old friend with whom he is still in love. He is recording for her the details of his soul and sadness, of a life filled with love and revolution, politics and poetry. Rigopoulos confesses that he does not know what he wishes his story to accomplish and ultimately concludes, with the simplicity of a tortured poet, "I want to write to you about my life." He will call her Louisa, and he shall sign as Loui.
In I Shall Sign as Loui, the renowned Greek writer Rhea Galanaki has given us a powerful, passionate story of the life of a historical figure told through fictional letters. Loui has grown up in western Greece and has been educated in Italy. He befriends Victor Hugo and Edgar Quinet, travels in the same circles as Karl Marx, and participates in the Italian underground and student uprisings in support of Garibaldi. Loui's letters to Louisa cover a life spent traveling across Europe, from Patras and the Ioanian Islands to Italy and Paris, and his experiences in the revolutionary movements of mid-nineteenth-century Europe and America. With lyrical, haunting prose, Galanaki blends fiction and reality to tell a story as rich in emotion as it is in history.

(Note for the cover of the American edition)

 
 

 

U.S.A. edition of I Shall Sign as Loui.