Little Infamies: Stories

Cunning, fantastical tales about a Greek village of the imagination, from a startling new talent. Panos Karnezis's remarkable stories are all set in the same nameless Greek village. His characters are the people who live there - the priest, the whore, the doctor, the seamstress, the mayor and the occasional animal: a centaur, a parrot that recites Homer, a horse called History. Their lives intersect, as lives do in a small place, and they know each other's secrets: the hidden crimes, the mysteries, the little infamies that men commit. Karnezis observes his villagers with a worldly eye, and creates a place where magic invariably loses out to harsh reality, a place full of passion, cruelty, and deep reserves of black humor. Nineteen debut stories reflect daily life in a Greek village over many years. Greece, first of all, is a nation of villages - from the sooty neighborhoods of Athens down to the tiny place ("so poor it doesn't have a name") that's the epicenter of these tales. The first-time author (a Greek engineer living in Britain) knows the brusque clannishness of his native land and conveys the rhythms and tempers of its life with a deft touch. "Another Day on Pegasus," for example, is told from the perspective of a bus driver: a sort of Greek Ralph Kramden who argues with his conductor, insults (or flirts with) his passengers, and manages despite the odds to keep his bus ("Pegasus") running from day to day. Greek bureaucracy is portrayed in its harshest light in "Jeremiad," about the unhappy fate of an old man who gets to the Pension Office late and dies in the waiting room before his claim is settled. Shadows of the classical age stretch into the present in "Circus Attraction" and "Cassandra Is Gone," both about the career of a centaur who becomes the star attraction of a flyblown rural circus and falls in love with the tattooed lady (who may or may not be the original Cassandra of Agamemnon). "A Classical Education" (a small-town clerk's attempts to teach Homer to his parrot) has a Flaubertian tone to it, while "Sacrifice" (a brief sketch of a father and son who slaughter a murderous cow) has a bitter tensity reminiscent of Chekhov. The finest piece, "Immortality," is an elegiac, almost mystical account of villagers in the early 20th century as they beg a waylaid photographer to "make us live forever" by taking their picture. Fine and true: Karnezis breathes fresh life into traditional Greek society without mocking or sanitizing it.