Guest of the ilb 2003
Jorgi Jatromanolakis was born in Saros on the island
of Crete in 1940. He studied Classical Philology in Athens and
then began his postgraduate studies at King’s College London, where he
completed a doctorate degree. He initially worked as a high
school teacher. Since 1975 he has been teaching at the University
of Athens, where today, after a guest professorship at Harvard
University from 1979 to 1980, he lectures in Classical Philology.
Jatromanolakis published his first prose texts in the seventies.
His literary breakthrough came in 1982 with the novel 'Istoría'
(Engl:'A History of a Vendetta', 1991) for which he received the Greek
National Award and the Nikos Kasantzakis Award. Two novels
followed: 'Anofelés diíjima' (1993;Engl: 'A Report of a Murder', 1995)
and 'Erotikón' (1995;Engl: 'Eroticon', 2001). His more recent novels,
'Stin kiláda ton Athinón' (2000; Engl: In the Valley of Athens) and
„Elinas kleos“ (2002), have yet to be translated into German.
Jatromanolakis also writes poems and scientific texts on Classical
Philology and New Greek Literature.
In 'A Report of a Murder' two physicists are shot by a graduate student
during a seminar on the island of Crete. The assailant then flees
to the mountains and commits suicide. His corpse is discovered by
a shepherd months later. In formal terms, the text is arranged as
a scientific report by an anonymous narrator who attempts to
reconstruct the murders on the basis of newspaper articles, autopsy
reports, photographs and evidence gathered at the scene of the
crime. However, out of the mysterious and inexplicable nature of
the acts, emerges the mythical strength of ancient legends, which still
seem to be present in the holy mountains of Crete.
Jorgi Jatromanolakis’s books are characterised by their complexity and
rigid adherence to form. The modern, sometimes not easily
accessible language of his texts is animated and enriched by stylistic
elements from Greek literary traditions. "If the first sentence of a
crime thriller already reveals the identity of the assailant, then the
author must be aiming at something other than nail-biting suspense",
wrote Ulrich M. Schmid on 'A Report of a Murder'. It is not the
sequence of events that forms the actual core of Jatromanolakis’s
stories, but rather an investigation into narrative perspective and the
search for moral categories of judgment. The fact that many of
his works are set in Greece also proves to provide the background
encompassed within the inseperatability of the characters from the
environs in which they live. Their history, tradition and myths
have become part of their personality.
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