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Margarita Karapanou: Ο υπνοβάτης (The Sleepwalker)

Any novel that starts with God as a character is probably going to be somewhat different and this novel certainly is. God is tired and fed up and not happy with the people he created. He created them with great love and look how they had turned out – small and ridiculous., his people had annihilated him. His earth had betrayed him. And he cursed it.

So he would send another God to them – : A handsome God, since all they worshipped was beauty. A slim-hipped God, man and woman at once, since they no longer respected the Law.. So he vomited on the Earth and his vomit fell on Manolis renamed Emmanuel.

We now move to some of God’s creatures. We start with a group of somewhat dissolute friends. First there is Mark. Mark paints portraits. He starts with with the feet and works up but, by the time he gets to the head, he is very drunk so never paints the head so all of his portraits are headless. His friends consider him a genius so they use his portraits as currency in their poker games. The book is set on an island, presumably Hydra. Luka has come to the island to write. She has a notebook full of blank pages and Alana had just urinated on it. Alana is a wilful puppy, not house-trained. She is cold as there is no heating as all the electricians had gone up in the hills to a monastery to sing a vigil and one had inadvertently knocked a switch. She cannot write anyway as she has drunk all her ink.

Placido is in a relationship with Ron. He speaks English but dreams in Spanish. He dreams that his father tells him – in Spanish – that he is a dirty little faggot.

Maggie is another would-be writer. She had come to the island to write a bestseller. and get rich. Instead she spends all day cooking. Her cookery books were Elizabethan Cuisine, Plato’s Symposia, and Renaissance Spices and Sauces.

Leonora used to be the mistress of Cuban leader Batista but fled Cuba after the Revolution with a lot of money.. She is now an alcoholic. She has been told by doctors that she will soon die. She does not.

There are quite a few of these people, many of them (would-be) artists or writers and many of them foreigners and Karapanou takes delight in mocking them. Many of them smoke heavily, drink heavily and eat a lot. They have regular casual sex, often violent, both homosexual and heterosexual. No doubt lung cancer, cirrhosis of the liver, diabetes and various STDs appear later.

However we have been awaiting the arrival of Manolis/Emmanuel. He turns out to be a blond handsome police officer. No-one recalls him arriving. He seems to have been there a while but has not. We now start getting a slew of brutal murders. Maniolis is investigating but his interrogations seem to be friendly chit-chats and he is no closer to finding the culprit. However we soon know who the culprit is. Maniolis’ boss has a sideline. When aa foreigner wants a residence permit renewed, he agrees provided the artist paints his portrait in his or her particular style. He now has a fine collection and is thinking of holding an exhibition.

While Maniolis seems to get on with everyone (though he is not impressed – they all come to the island, shut themselves up with a typewriter and paper, and write page after page of bullshit) , he really prefers two people Luka and Mark, a writer and a painter. Mark is the painter of headless portrait painter and has raped a young boy. Maniolis knows this but does nothing. He is apparently in love with Luka but… Who is he? Luka thought, and for the first time she felt scared. Who is this man who dreams about tidal waves, who makes love to the Virgin but never touches me, who seems more distant than a passer-by on the street yet more familiar to me than myself?”. She does not get an answer.

Maniolis manages to pck up some English, useful in his job, including What the fuck,’ ‘screw you, bastard,’ ‘motherfucker,’ ‘faggot,’ that’s better than ‘queer.

But gradually he turns against the others: they did nothing at all, they slept all day and got disgustingly drunk at night and destroyed everything, and for Manolis that kind of disorder was worse than murder.

It is not just Maniolis who is cynical about the island . One visiting writer comments would Kafka ever have written his Metamorphosis if he’d been smacked in the face with a view like that every morning? No, he’d have written Heidi.

But things start to get worse. The island was empty. Its beauty had once been soft and rounded, but had now taken on a jagged edge—even the birds now sang with shrill, harsh notes. The rubbish used to be collected regularly but now it is not. However the residents continue to put out their bags, with the pile rising higher and higher” .The bags rose in heaps, formed peaks and craters, turning the waterfront into a moonscape. The black bags concealed the houses, all the way up to their roofs. The entire line of storefronts along the water seemed hidden behind a black mask. And of course they smell. Maniolis starts a one man crusade of throwing the bags into the sea but it makes little difference. And then it gets hotter and hotter and the sun never seems to set.

In one respect this is simply a dystopia. A seemingly lovely Greek island (I have visited Hydra more than once and can confirm it is an attractive island, though very touristy as it is close to Athens) turns unpleasant not least because of the dissolute foreign visitors but also because of the murders and other deaths ( a man dies because of a strange virus, another who refuses to leave his house when it catches fire).,Of course, as we saw at the beginning of the book it is Maniolis, the smiling, friendly, good-looking man who is really rhe devil in disguise, who is key to this book. Karapanou clearly has a fairly cynical view of the human race and, in particular, the well-to-do leisured classes and fellow writers and artists, and tells an excellent story about how they (and we?) are all damned and doomed.

Publishing history

First published in 1985by Hermes
First English translation in 2011 by Clockroot Books
Translated by Karen Emmerich