Panos KarnezisPanos Karnezis
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Biography
Panos Karnezis was born in Greece in 1967 and came to England in 1992. He studied engineering and worked in industry, then studied for an MA in Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia.
His first book, Little Infamies (2002) is a collection of connected short stories set in one nameless Greek village, and his second book, The Maze (2004), is a novel set in Anatolia in 1922. It was shortlisted for the 2004 Whitbread First Novel Award. Short stories by Panos Karnezis have been broadcast by BBC Radio 4 and have appeared in Granta, New Writing 11, Prospect, and Areté.
Panos Karnezis lives in London. His latest novel is The Birthday Party (2007).
Genres (in alphabetical order)
Fiction, Short stories
Bibliography
Little Infamies Cape, 2002
The Maze Cape, 2004
The Birthday Party Cape, 2007
Prizes and awards
2004 Pendleton May First Novel Award The Maze
2004 Whitbread First Novel Award (shortlist) The Maze
Critical Perspective
It is difficult to overestimate the achievement of someone who writes a good story in another language. For that person to write something of resonance and wit is nothing short of miraculous. To the ranks of Joseph Conrad and Vladimir Nabokov we must now add the Greek writer Panos Karnezis.
Karnezis’ first book, Little Infamies (2002), is a collection of loosely connected tales concerning life in a Greek village which is 'so poor it doesn’t have a name.' Events take place some time after the Second World War as the modern world threatens the rhythms and routines that the inhabitants are incapable of moving beyond. The characters in Little Infamies, trapped by time and geography, are archetypes: the barber, the doctor, the priest, the whore, the landowner.
In 'A Funeral of Stones', a father imprisons his twin daughters in the cellar after their mother dies in childbirth. They eventually escape, and, as young women, return to exact a devilish revenge: they will infect their father with a virus. They do not, however, reckon upon antibiotics. In 'Jeremiad', an elderly man dies waiting to collect his pension. No one notices, being far too preoccupied with their own matters. The final line in the story manages to be both laugh-out-loud funny and deeply sad: a key to Karnezis, who is able to tap into the bathetic and pathetic with considerable ease. 'A Classical Education', about a clerk’s attempts to teach his parrot Homer, is sublime, exquisite, beautifully timed, heartbreaking and extremely funny.
There is so much in this collection that it is hard to believe it is under 300 pages in length. It is even harder to believe that it is a first work. Little Infamies is very difficult to free yourself from. Many of the stories stay with you. Indeed, it is only some days after finishing this book that you realise just how good it is. These tales burn and simmer, you can touch and feel and taste and smell them. Karnezis’ village is both absolutely particular and undeniably universal. These are morality tales without the easy moralising; Karnezis’ world is one of secrets, hidden, and sometimes revealed by, characters who are miscreants and murderers, hoaxers, cheats and thieves. There is cruelty and lust, humiliation and unashamed selfishness; Karnezis suffuses it all with a sly, playful, black sense humour. Throughout Little Infamies, there is a tenderness undercut with the macabre. There is also an almost tangible sense of place, for Karnezis has the sharpest of eyes.
The best stories in Little Infamies are mesmerising, moving between tragedy and farce. There are moments of exaltation and sudden menace. These tales are fable-like yet brutally realistic; the brilliance of the collection comes in the way Karnezis is able to fuse the two. Little Infamies is about real, lived life, and in its glimpse of a self-contained world which has universal significance, it is reminiscent of Joyce’s Dubliners.
There is no quaintness or false sentimentality in Little Infamies, which to my mind is what makes it so refreshing. There are suggestions of magic realism here, but reality is never far away, to strip the world of any easy mysticism. Karnezis has produced something truly original. In reading them you delight in the way they have been sculpted and shaped and structured so skilfully. Karnezis has spoken of how his engineering background has given him a rigorous attitude to language. It shows. Everything counts here. As in the best short stories, nothing is wasted.
The Maze (2004), Karnezis’ debut novel, was shortlisted for the Whitbread First Novel Award. With a narrative style reminiscent of Louis de Bernières, this impressive first novel deals with the war between Greece and Turkey, which took place in Anatolia between 1919 and 1922. The war began when a Greek expeditionary force landed in Ottoman Asia Minor with the ultimate aim of annexing the Ottoman Mediterranean areas where a substantial Greek population lived. The Greek army lost and was forced to retreat. The Maze follows a blundering Greek expeditionary force as it meanders its way to the coast in the hope of making an escape, all the while pursued by the Turkish army which is seeking revenge for three years of occupation. Brigadier Nestor, addicted to morphia and Greek myths, is perhaps the most intriguing of the many characters in this book; he characterises his brigade as 'either thieves, traitors or martyrs', a group who are all suffering from the recent memory of their role in a massacre of Turkish civilians. He is not only obsessed with discovering who is behind the sudden spate of thefts, but just who is responsible for the communist propaganda that keeps appearing in the camp. Then there is Father Simeon, troubled by the soldiers’ lack of interest in religion. However, they have been seen before. When the brigade reaches a small town near Smyrna, which has been completely untouched by the war, we are back in the territory of Little Infamies. Once more there is the panoply of odd and intriguing characters, such as the less than intellectually bright Mayor, the unashamed prostitute Madame Violetta and the hunchback gardener. As with Little Infamies, we have the clash between the modern age and tradition, and the confrontation of science and faith.
The Maze, with its staking out of a fictional ground that is far from being either safe or customary, with its endlessly inventive and memorable characters, with a tender sensitiviry that often comes as a surprise, is just as ambitious as Little Infamies. It is an assured and effectively structured performance, but suffers a little in its pacing, something that very occasionally undermined Little Infamies. At times the prose loses its rhythm. But this is never enough to stop us from reading; all it does is demand we slow down a little, which allows us to savour the author’s astonishing ability to evoke his fictional worlds. I would suggest that Karnezis’ natural mode is the short story, but whatever he should choose to do next, his is an undoubtedly powerful and enchanting new voice.
Garan Holcombe, 2005
Contact information
Publisher (General enquiries)
Jonathan Cape Ltd
Random House UK Ltd
20 Vauxhall Bridge Road
London SW1V 2SA
England
Tel: +44 (0)20 7840 8539
Fax: +44 (0)20 7932 0077
http://www.randomhouse.co.uk/
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