Short story collection review

Little Infamies

By Panos Karnezis

Published by Vintage

These interlinked short stories about life in an unnamed rural Greek village are beautifully written with a light and almost magical touch that suits both the comic and the tragic themes of the book.

Karnezis writes about a beautiful woman in a yellow dress who cons a bus driver with the help of her looks; a man who tries to teach his parrots the classics; a huge, but gentle – and put-upon - café owner called Whale; and an old man whose quiet death in the pension office goes unnoticed for hours.

Darker stories tell of a group of hunters who arrive in the village in the middle of the winter and terrorise the inhabitants; a man who locks his twin daughters away for causing the death of his beloved wife – until they escape and are rescued by a birdseller; and, ultimately, the demise of the village itself.

The strong and influential presence of the priest, Father Yerasimo, pervades many of the stories: his exhortations to the inhabitants to pray usually fall on deaf ears, but his cunning and ability to induce guilt in his flock help him to get his own way sometimes.

The pace of life in Karnezis’s struggling village is slow, but far from uneventful. The residents survive from one day to the next, tackling their problems with equal measures of rural wisdom and rural stupidity (or, more kindly, naïveté), more often than not coming off worse, but just occasionally finding themselves – however briefly – on top.

Reviewed by James Smith, Booktrust website editor

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