After bursting onto the literary scene in 2003 with his much acclaimed collection of short stories Little Infamies , Greek native Panos Karnezis is back with a novel that is sure to secure him a place amongst contemporary fictions’ heavyweights. The Maze, published by Random House subsidiary Jonathan Cape , was released in February 2004.
A rising star
Born in the western Peloponnese in 1967, Karnezis grew up in Athens from the age of four. In 1992 he moved to Oxford , England to pursue a Ph.D. in engineering. After completing his Ph.D. and spending several years working in the steel industry in Sheffield, Karnezis took up writing as a hobby, enrolling in a creative writing course at the University of East Anglia . What began as a mere pastime soon flowered into vital means of self-expression. As Karnezis told Odyssey magazine following the success of Little Infamies, “Writing soon became so precious, not even my closest friends knew I was doing it.”
Though much has been made of the fact that Karnezis chose to write both Little Infamies and The Maze in English, instead of his native Greek, it is Karnezis’ robust and luminous style that has caught the attention of critics and literary aficionados worldwide.
In 2002, Annie Proulx, winner of both the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award , called Karnezis “the literary find of the year.” The Guardian and British Vogue have both cited The Maze as one of the most anticipated books of 2004, whereas the New York Times and the San Francisco Chronicle have likened Karnezis’ literary “flights of fancy” and “magical realism” to that of celebrated Columbian writer Gabriel Garcia Marquez.
A true testament of Karnezis’ success is that publishers in France, Greece, the Netherlands, Italy, and Israel all have plans to release translations of Little Infamies.
New avatar of Greek imagination
Set in the summer of 1922, The Maze tells the story of a Greek army brigade forced to evacuate Asia Minor after the Turks win a series of decisive military battles. With morale shattered and provisions scant, the “expeditionary force” begins a headlong retreat towards the Mediterranean coast, only to lose its way in the unrelenting terrain of the Anatolian desert.
After “roaming blindly across the endless maze of sand and dust,” salvation finally arrives in the shape of a small, dilapidated village still unscathed by the war. But even the safety of an unassuming rural community cannot rid the doomed brigade of its inexplicable curse. What emerges is a tale as savage as it is tender, which succeeds in probing the murky depths that underlie the human condition.
What is remarkable about The Maze is not the novel’s crafty plot or its poignant descriptions of the sufferings of war (though these are both superb), but Karnezis’ sharp ear for dialogue. Through an intricate web of deadpan conversations Karnezis deftly conveys both the idiosyncrasies of individual characters and his own mordant sense of humour.
In the end, it is the subtleties of the relationships between Karnezis’ motley cast of eccentric personalities – which includes a fanatical one-eyed pastor, a morphine addicted brigadier, an aristocratic crash-landed pilot, a communist sympathizer, a corrupted mayor, a sensitive hunchback gardener, and a fiery red-headed prostitute – that carries this heart-wrenching narrative.
Though Karnezis’ nimble prose makes for a quick read, the way, in which the novel’s characters crumble under the weight of their own imperfections, lingers in the reader’s mind long after the last page has been turned. From the imaginary wasteland of a defeated army, Karnezis has erected a moving story of human vulnerability and the beginning of a remarkable literary career.
