Hello, readers! It is Monday again! As it is Monday, welcome to another #5OnMyTBR update. The rule is relatively simple. I must pick five books from my to-be-read piles that fit the week’s theme.

This week’s theme: Happy 4 Years of #5OnMyTBR Freebie

I just learned that today is the Greek Independence Day. As such, I have chosen to feature works of Greek literature on my reading list. Happy reading!

5OnMyTBR is a bookish meme hosted by E. @ Local Bee Hunter’s Nook where you chose five books from your to-be-read pile that fit that week’s theme. If you’d like more info, head over to the announcement post!

Title: Z
Author: Vassilis Vassilikos
Translator (From Greek): Marilyn Calmann
Publisher: Seven Stories Press
Publishing Date: January 2017 (1966)
No. of Pages: 406

Synopsis: 

A progressive parliamentary deputy is scheduled to appear at a political rally. Meanwhile, local political bosses plot his assassination. Thugs are recruited to disrupt the rally. Rumors begin to spread. But the forces already set in motion are irresistible. Z is the story of a crime, a time, a place, and people transformed by events.

Z was published in Greece in 1966, and banned there one year later. It is based on an actual political assassination in 1963 in Salonika. The victim was Gregory Lambrakis, a socialist legislator and outspoken critic of the government. But Lamrakis’s killers could not have anticipated the public response. His funeral became a political event; by the time the cortege reaches Athens, 400,000 people were following the coffin in silence. In the nation’s capital, the letter Z suddenly appeared on walls, sidewalks, posters – everywhere. Z stands for the Greek verb zei, “he lives.”

Title: The Last Temptation of Christ
Author: Nikos Kazantzakis

Synopsis: 

Hailed as a masterpiece by critics worldwide, The Last Temptation of Christ is a monumental reinterpretation of the Gospels that brilliantly fleshes out Christ’s Passion. This literary rendering of the life of Jesus Christ has courted controversy since its publication by depicting a Christ far more human than the one seen in the Bible. He is a figure who is gloriously divine but earthy and human, a man like any other—subject to fear, doubt, and pain.

In elegant, thoughtful prose Nikos Kazantzakis, one of the greats of modern literature, follows this Jesus as he struggles to live out God’s will for him, powerfully suggesting that it was Christ’s ultimate triumph over his flawed humanity, when he gave up the temptation to run from the cross and willingly laid down his life for mankind, that truly made him the venerable redeemer of men. (Source: Goodreads)

Title: The Sleepwalker
Author: Margarita Karapanou

Synopsis: 

At the opening of Margarita Karapanou’s stunning second novel, in disgust at mankind God vomits a new Messiah onto the earth. Or rather, onto a Greek island. Populated by villagers, ex-pats, artists, writers, this island is a Tower of Babel, a place where languages and individuals have been assembled, as though in wait for something as horrific and comic as this second coming. The Sleepwalker moves deftly and dizzyingly between genres-satire, murder mystery, magical realism, its own brand of Theater of the Absurd-following Manolis, the new Messiah, as he moves through this place like a sleepwalker, unaware to the very end of his divine nature. Manolis, in his guise as policeman, leaves nothing unchanged by his passing, as the island shifts from a conventional locale for upper-class tourists and drifters to a place where the surreal comes to life and the sun refuses to set. In The Sleepwalker Karapanou has created an unforgettable depiction of a dissolute world, desperately comic and full of compassion, a world in which nightmare and miracle both uneasily reside. (Source: Goodreads)

Title: Farewell Anatolia
Author: Dido Sotiriou

Synopsis: 

Farewell Anatolia is a tale of paradise lost and of shattered innocence; a tragic fresco of the fall of Hellenism in Asia Minor; a stinging indictment of Great Power politics, oil-lust and corruption.

Dido Soteriou’s novel – a perennial best-seller in Greece since it first appeared in 1962 – tells the story of Manolis Axiotis, a poor but resourceful villager born near the ancient ruins of Ephesus. Axiotis is a fictional protagonist and eyewitness to an authentic Greece’s “Asia Minor Catastrophe,” the death or expulsion of two million Greeks from Turkey by Kemal Attaturk’s revolutionary forces in the late summer of 1922.

Manolis Axiotis’ chronicle of personal fortitude, betrayed hope, and defeat resonates with the greater tragedy of two Greece, vanquished and humiliated; Turkey, bloodily victorious. Two neighbours linked by bonds of culture and history yet diminished by mutual greed, cruelty and bloodshed. (Source: Goodreads)

Title: The Third Wedding
Author: Costas Taktsis

Synopsis: 

The German Occupation, the Civil War and life itself seen through the eyes of two Athenian women. (Source: Goodreads)