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Read the interview Sebastian Barry gave to Maro Vassiliadou for *Kathimerini* on the occasion of the publication of his latest novel, *Days Without End* (translated by Maria Angelidou). The Irish author Sebastian Barry is so popular and has won so many awards that his work needs no introduction. Critics consistently highlight his mature literary style, his skill in creating an evocative atmosphere, and his talent for crafting authentic characters. In February, he was honoured with the highest distinction in Irish literature (Laureate for Irish Fiction), and his latest novel, Days Without End, has already enjoyed a highly acclaimed international reception. Clearly, then, an interview with him, on the occasion of the recent publication in Greece of Days Without End by Ikaros Publications in Maria Angelidou’s marvellous translation, is a must.However, this was not the main reason for speaking with him. It was, first and foremost, the desire of the captivated reader to ‘meet’ their author and ask the questions that unlock the secrets of his art. Sebastián Barri has the makings and the power of a great storyteller. His stories, often written in the first person, do not merely describe places, lives, passions and the adventures of people. They become the very eyes and ears of an eyewitness. They become his voice which, as if distant time and an unknown place were not intervening, speaks to you as you read.In 1850s America: This time, in his latest novel, Barry’s commitment to telling the story of two Irish families, the Duns and the McNaldys, across different time periods, takes him all the way to America. His heroes enlist in the US Army in the 1850s and take part in the wars that tore the country apart during that decade. For the author, this journey into the unknown becomes a means of speaking once again of the difficult lives of people who must always struggle and carve out their own destiny. With clarity and sensitivity, with cries and silences, violent yet tender, this novel is a journey towards maturity. And at the same time, a search into the past of a nation that contains fragments of the memories of other peoples and other continents. History is reconstructed as the protagonists seek their personal identity. Those who left, driven by necessity, find in their new home an opportunity to put down roots. And if they manage to survive, then they will be able to share scattered moments of happiness.Your earlier novel, Far, Far Away, is the story of the Irishman Willie Dun, as told from the front lines of the First World War. What inspired you to write another novel related to war, *Days Without End*, which is, however, set in America during the era of the Indian Wars and the Civil War?The character of William Dan in *Far, Far Away* has its roots in the ghost of a son in a work of mine called *The Steward of Christendom*, which dealt with the last days of his father’s life. He was, however, merely a shadow, a passing figure. That work referred in some way to my great-great-grandfather and essentially revealed that in ‘real life’ this man, my distant ancestor, had three sons who went to war. So, in essence, the novel was an attempt to find that uncle of mine who was a soldier during the First World War. Similarly, the root of his character in Days Without End lies in my grandfather, who, shortly before he died, revealed to me that he had a distant uncle who fought in the war against the Indians. I was only ten years old when he told me. We used to share the same bed during the long, cold Irish winters, and he had told me many stories from his life. But that was the only clue I had: a brief mention of that uncle, not even his name. It was enough, however, for me to ‘search’ for him 50 years later. How do you manage to describe the experiences, feelings and thoughts of a soldier as an eyewitness, without ever having been forced to fight?I never went to war, but I shared a bed with someone who did! Grandad O’Hara, whose novel is called The Temporary Gentleman, was a radio operator in the British Merchant Navy, and during the Second World War he served as an officer in the Royal Engineers, specialising in bomb disposal. He did two tours of duty in England and also travelled as far as North Africa and India. He loved to recount vivid stories of all this to me. But beyond that, I like to believe that our ancestors lie in wait within us, wrapped up in the coils of our DNA and our molecular structure. They are somewhere in the signals of the brain’s synapses. So, although I never took part in the Indian wars or the American Civil War, perhaps my distant uncle was there. And so I may have access to his life and to what he saw. After all, what we call a historical novel does not exist. You cannot return to the past as if the future had never existed, or as if what we now know so well were unknown. You simply make an effort to recreate that ‘innocent’ present, just as it was back then. Obviously, to achieve this, you have to read hundreds of books and then try to forget them, so that the necessary details emerge in your writing as if they were your own experiences.I believe that Thomas McNulty is one of the most authentic and daring contemporary literary characters. What inspired you to create him? Well, I’d been thinking about Thomas McNulty for a long time. Basically, I was concerned because he was Irish, and his people had endured 700 years of colonial rule, at times in an atmosphere akin to ethnic cleansing and the displacement of the local population. So this character had to find himself in America and, to a greater or lesser extent, become embroiled in a situation that was almost familiar to him. Furthermore, I was for a short time friends with Peter Mathiesen, the American writer, who worked extensively on the subject of Native Americans. However, the final impetus for creating Thomas came from my beloved and wonderful son Toby, who, at the age of 16, revealed to us that he is gay. He thus became my inspiration, the guide to Thomas’s heart. For this reason, the book is dedicated to him. The greater the pain, the more invisible it makes you. *Days Without End* is a hard-hitting book, set in the American West. Nevertheless, the reader never feels for a moment that this distant story – a foreign place, a foreign time – does not concern them. In recent years, your country, like Greece, has faced a very difficult economic and social situation. However, you choose to draw your themes from the past rather than the present. Why? I lived in Greece, on Paros, from 1980 to 1981. The country was just recovering from years of political oppression and was preparing to join the European Union. It was poor, but it was beginning to regain its strength. The people welcomed us warmly, just like the Irish! The tranquil beauty of the island was heart-wrenching. It was a place that became, for me, even more familiar than my own home. So I have been deeply disturbed in recent years, during the economic crisis, by the way Greece has been spoken of in the European Parliament and elsewhere. The anguish caused by this new poverty must be immense. But the greater the pain, the more invisible it makes you. You begin to disappear, even though you are still breathing. There is something of this in Days Without End, which is the story of two boys, and later two men, who have nothing of their own. And like little gods, they must create a world out of nothing. Apart from that, however, I do not possess the kind of imagination that responds to what we might call ‘the present moment’. That is the domain, the ability and the necessity of journalism. I must say, however, that without journalism and, paradoxically for the time, the photography of the 1860s in America, I could not have written Days Without End. Nevertheless, the present remains a mystery to me, and as unknown as the future. It has not yet become clear; it is not visible. In your books, you always speak of Ireland and the Irish with great tenderness but also honesty, without ever flattering them. How do they treat you? The Irish are self-critical, paradoxically. Perhaps it is a new trait of ours, or at least a recent one. For far too long we saw ourselves as victims of history, and blamed the English. However, over the last twenty years we have reassessed our own role in our misfortunes. I am referring to our behaviour towards women, homosexuals, the poor, and children. So, I have never encountered any hostility in Ireland because of my novels. On the contrary, they have been warmly embraced. Perhaps I ought to be concerned about that. Indeed, I was recently taken aback when I was honoured with the highest distinction in Irish literature (Laureate for Irish Fiction), awarded by the President of the country. On the other hand, of course, we have a wonderful President, who is also a poet. Come to think of it, when you meet him, he gives you a very warm hug!What is your routine when you’re writing? I work and read for about a year, trying to stay calm. Some very strange things happen whilst I’m writing. The need to connect with the era I’m describing is so great that my sole purpose is to be there. The means by which I travel there are syntax, grammar, language, songs. These are my own time machine. Everything I see and hear on these journeys is my story. Doesn’t that seem a bit silly, a bit childish? I think so. And yet, I’m grateful for it.

Soloúp, to mark the publication of his new graphic novel *The Collector: Six Stories About a Bad Wolf*, gave an interview to Yannis Koukoulas for *Efimerida ton Syntakton*. You can read it below: I’ve just finished reading your book and I won’t hide the fact that I went through a lot of tissues wiping away my tears. Was it your intention to evoke such emotion? When you try to tell such an emotionally charged story, it overwhelms you, the writer, first and foremost. You don’t think about whether this particular narrative will move others. You wish for it and hope for it, of course, but at that moment it doesn’t really concern you that much. The overriding concern is to clearly articulate the questions that ‘gnaw’ at your protagonist and then to confront him with them. What preoccupied me whilst working on *The Collector* was what stance Dionysis would take in the face of the absurd situations arising in his life, as well as the bureaucratic, almost Kafkaesque, justice system that regards fathers as ‘guilty until proven innocent’ from the outset. The hero’s struggle to stand tall without simultaneously distancing himself from his child, Fotinoula, is probably what really tugs at the heartstrings. Let’s see. You’re one of the first readers of ‘The Collector’, so you give me hope that the graphic novel ‘works’. I’m eagerly awaiting readers’ reactions.How did it come about, particularly after ‘Aivali’ and your unconventional take on the turbulent history of Greek-Turkish relations, that you’d write a book about family and separation? I have several scripts in the pipeline that engage with history. One of them, in fact, has been ready since the time I was working on ‘Aivali’ and is set in the same period. I hope one day you’ll see it in its finished form. For the time being, I deliberately wanted to avoid the well-known trap that writers fall into when, after a successful work, they try to repeat themselves.It was therefore a challenge to tackle something completely different, let alone a burning social issue such as the psychological – and not only psychological – ‘abuse’ of those involved in a divorce.What connection does Antonis Nikolopoulos have with Dionysis in the story? Does the book contain autobiographical elements or is it a work of fiction? Just as you put it, my name is Antonis, and the protagonist is Dionysis. Life is always something different from a book. The story of a book constitutes a closed universe. Life, on the other hand, is open. Uncharted, subversive and unpredictable. It is precisely these absurd – as Camus describes them – characteristics of ‘reality’ that are, at the same time, what feed fiction and artistic creation: in novels, screenplays, music and paintings.I would therefore say that it matters little to a reader whether the story of a book, such as *The Collector*, concerns the author, so long as the problems it addresses exist everywhere out there. Stories that are often far more traumatic and painful than Dionysis’s, and which poison the lives of thousands of people.There are problematic divorces that alienate children from their parents, with no meaningful support from the institutions (psychologists, social workers, etc.) and a justice system that ends up being part of the problem rather than the solution. It is an issue that all the relevant bodies are aware of, but nobody speaks openly about it.So the heroes may be fictional, but the situations experienced by thousands of people like Dionysis – and, sadly, all over the world – can hardly be described as mere fiction. I know I’ll be prying if I ask who Little Red Riding Hood’s daughter is, to whom you’ve dedicated the book. But I’ll do so, since you’ve devoted an entire chapter to her. The fifth chapter of the graphic novel reinterprets the fairy tale of Little Red Riding Hood. There are countless variations of the fairy tale, from the earliest folk narratives and Perrault’s version right up to the present day. The most widely known and illustrated version is that of the Brothers Grimm. What is interesting is that in the Grimm brothers’ version – they themselves being ‘collectors’ of fairy tales – they also include a second variation, in which it is Little Red Riding Hood herself who kills the big bad wolf.This second ‘Little Red Riding Hood’ forms the basis in the graphic novel for a new interpretation of the fairy tale aimed at a contemporary audience, namely Little Red Riding Hood’s daughter. She is the one who, with the necessary distance from the tensions, could understand that modern fairy tales do not only feature good and evil characters.Why do you use the term ‘big bad wolf’ for your protagonist in the subtitle? Things in life aren’t black and white. Likewise, the people around us aren’t just good or just bad. Every character harbours many personalities and emotions. On the other hand, how we describe things depends on where we stand and how we view them. A wolf is ‘bad’ because someone wants to see it that way. Someone else might see it differently. That is why, across the six chapters of the graphic novel, I have tried to follow Dionysis’s story from different perspectives: that of the neighbour, a canary, the grandfather and grandmother, the hare, and finally, of course, to present Dionysis’s own subjective view of what he is experiencing. In your book, reality and fantasy are inextricably intertwined. Little Red Riding Hood, Alice in Wonderland, a refugee struggling to save a little bird, a huge cage atop the Acropolis, and Little Loulou all become elements of a multi-layered narrative. How would you describe your book in 100 words? You don’t need that many words. Just two are enough to describe the feelings of the book’s main character, in the rain under an umbrella: ‘Silent scream’.And what about Plato’s cave? Are we all chained and seeing only shadows? And who are those who show them to us, misleading us? In Plato’s ‘Republic’ there is the remarkable allegory of the cave. A text written almost 2,500 years ago that describes with chilling clarity – one might say prophetically – the ‘isms’ that subsequently swept through human societies. ‘Isms’ that, over time, nourish people and are nourished by their minds and bodies. Religions and ideologies which, through dogmas, aphorisms, slogans and absolute truths, mask the anxieties of the masses by offering them idealised solutions or redemptions.It does not matter so much, then, according to Plato himself, who the ‘deceivers’ are on any given occasion, as the fact that what gives rise to and perpetuates this particular condition is the inability of human societies to face the truth of existence head-on.In the foreword, you use a phrase from Kafka’s *The Trial*: ‘And now I advise you to go to your room, sit quietly and wait to see what they decide about you’. How did you come to choose this? When I first read Kafka at a younger age, he seemed exaggerated to me. As I’ve grown older, however, I’ve realised more and more often just how ‘Kafkaesque’ many situations in real life can turn out to be. A father, for example, like Dionysis, who, for no justifiable reason, is unable to communicate with his child, whilst at the same time being caught up in an absurd saga of court adjournments, is not dissimilar to Josef K. in Kafka’s *The Trial*, as we watch him march towards his predetermined doom.Among other things, there are reservations and a harsh, bitter critique of the Greek justice system and the police. How much can a citizen trust these institutions today? It depends on whose perspective you take, that of the perpetrator or the victim. Although both are clearly institutional manifestations of the ruling power, we perceive them differently as individuals when, say, ‘100’ and rush to the police officer to protect you from an injustice, and differently when a ‘cop’ beats you up at a demonstration. On the other hand, the conventions, the theatrics and the conventional lies played out in courtrooms, with legal tricks, lawyers’ tactics, coached false witnesses and bureaucracy.What is certain, however, regarding this specific issue, is that the Greek justice system lags considerably behind developments in Europe and the rest of the world.‘Parental alienation’ syndrome, for example, was recently classified as a disease by the World Health Organisation (WHO). Here, nobody cares. Trapped in pre-packaged decisions, ignoring the concept of joint custody that is gaining ground everywhere and readily placing the burden on fathers, the justice system not only fails to offer solutions but remains, rather, part of the problem.You have been an experienced political cartoonist and creator of humorous comics for almost 30 years. Suddenly ‘Aivali’ appeared, and now ‘The Collector’. Did you realise that you’re getting older and want to make sure you say other things besides just making readers laugh? Life is unpredictable and has room for everything, both comedies and dramas. Every new situation we encounter challenges us in a different way and requires a different approach. After so many years, sketching has probably become an instinctive way of thinking and reacting in my mind.I would therefore describe it as a happy coincidence to be able to sketch using different approaches – humour, political satire, graphic novels – for issues that concern us all. A situation that allows you to think and express yourself whilst simultaneously distancing you from the situations. Are comics a suitable medium and tool for telling such difficult stories, ranging from political and historical issues to traumatic personal experiences?To my surprise, through what I am gradually discovering in my work, but also through what I see, enjoy and admire in the work of so many cartoonists all over the world, yes! Comics, now fully mature, are a wonderful art form that continues to evolve, combining words with images and constantly discovering new narrative paths.In Greece, in fact, we are currently witnessing a remarkable boom in comics, owing their strong roots to the years of ‘Vavel’ and ‘Para Pente’.After ‘The Collector’, what can we expect: Have you started work on your next project? ‘The Collector’ has only just begun and ‘Aivali’ still has a long way to go. There are exciting things in the pipeline for both. On the other hand, you need some time to understand what will come next. That doesn’t mean there aren’t already many different scripts at a fairly advanced stage waiting in the wings.

Marialena Semitekolou, on the occasion of her novella *Sundays, in Summer*, gave an interview to Sofia Zisi for *Tetragono*. Read it below: In your book, you use the present tense and a simple vocabulary, which lends a sense of immediacy to your narrative. Is simplicity of style a goal for you? What meaning would a story have if its charm and interest were limited to the elaborate style of the narrative? I admire stories in which the style serves the needs of the narrative and not the other way round. Marina’s Sunday is a simple Sunday, and above all immersive in the way she experiences it, despite her flashbacks to the past and her dreamlike journeys. Marina is a simple heroine, without narcissism or posturing. She is a heroine who almost consciously renounces her ‘depth’ or her narrative substance. I hope that the directness and simplicity you have discerned in the style of my narrative faithfully convey the unique nature of my heroine and her summer Sunday.Each of the book’s sections (Morning, Midday, Afternoon, Evening, Monday) begins with the lyrics of a song, serving as an epigraph. How did you choose these particular songs? These specific – favourite – songs emerged spontaneously, but not at all by chance, I imagine. Their lyrics are directly linked to the text: they look at it askance and/or mock it (Morning, Monday), they describe it, giving it an inner tone (Noon), they make an invocation / prayer for the sake of the text (Afternoon) and they resonate with it, summarising it with exceptional simplicity (Evening).How long did it take you to write Marina’s story? The story was written in two phases (morning–midday and afternoon–evening–Monday). Each of these phases was written rather quickly, almost intensively. However, a lot of time passed between the two phases and there was a long pause, so that in the end Marina’s Sunday lasted much longer than 24 hours… Your narrative gives the impression that it consciously avoids the pursuit of originality. Are there moments when you’re drawn to the idea of writing something that has never been written in quite the same way before? I’m not sure what you mean by the word ‘originality’ or whether one can even speak of ‘original writing’ anymore. I’m drawn to the idea of writing in a style that doesn’t put on airs or mechanically imitate others. I want to consciously avoid the sense of tedium, of monotony and of sloppiness, something I feel happens when I lose my emotional connection with what I’m writing.One might describe your book as nostalgic, confessional, associative, minimalist. How would you like it to be described? Three words would suffice for me to describe the book: honest, finely crafted, moving. I’d like all three to be tightly interwoven with one another. I also really like all the descriptions you’ve chosen! Do you feel that your writing fits into a particular literary movement? What is your relationship with the literary tradition both within and outside Greece? I feel that your question is of a literary nature. I therefore ‘hold back’ from answering it, because I do not come from the world of academia, which would allow me to respond with the precision and competence I would like. Moreover, I do not know how my self-identification with a particular literary movement would help me. My relationship (as a reader) with the literary tradition both within and outside Greece is rather unruly and playful: I make my way from book to book, without a specific plan and without any strict adherence to what ‘must’ or must not be read. I imagine this choice has cost me some perhaps serious gaps in my reading, but I make up for them, feeling the luxury of an amateur, rather than a professional (of writing and reading).Is writing a solitary task for you? Do you need to isolate yourself to write? I find it hard to imagine writing as a social activity! I need to be ‘alone’ when I write, either literally or in my mind (whilst doing other, unrelated things). But I don’t necessarily isolate myself. It has happened, for instance, that I’ve written a whole page whilst a group of young children were playing noisily and laughing right next to me, or on several occasions, crammed onto a bus, I’ve written sentences in my head. It is a state of unique concentration, precious and almost magical, which you never know when it will come to you.A phrase from your book that you feel sums it up (apart from the title)? ‘She scans the walls around her with her eyes, sweeps them with her gaze, feels them with her hands to find a hole, an opening to start digging at it patiently to make it bigger and let in a little air, to let a sliver of light shine through.”

Read below the exclusive interview given by Georgi Gospodinov to Grigoris Bekos for *To Vima*, on the occasion of the publication of his novel *On the Physics of Melancholy* (translated by Alexandra Ioannidou). Postmodern Balkan literature. To many, the combination of these words seems incongruous. After all, all three are burdened by misconceptions or prejudices. The truth, however, is that there have always been literary circles in South-Eastern Europe dedicated to producing literature that is high-quality, experimental and, at the same time, demanding, sometimes at the cutting edge of artistic exploration. Those who have read works by Danilo Kiš, Milorad Pavić or Dubravka Ugrešić, for example, will certainly welcome the first appearance in Greek of a book by Georgi Gospodinov.Myth and biographyThe Bulgarian author, born in 1968 in the town of Yambol, one of the most widely translated and internationally recognised writers, introduces himself to us with his novel On the Physics of Melancholy. It is a charming and strange book organised (and expanding in a branching manner) around a central image, the Minotaur. It is essentially a unique blend of myth and biography (the latter in the broadest sense of the term, as it is not merely personal, but familial and social, and ultimately national).The other day, when he spoke to ‘To Vima’, Georgi Gospodinov had just landed from a business trip to Spain. At the start of this summer, he had returned to Sofia from New York, where he spent a whole year as a fellow at the renowned New York Public Library (NYPL) and the Cullman Center. ‘Actually, I’m not entirely sure if I’ve returned. In the meantime, my new book, ‘All Our Bodies’, has been published. It contains very short stories; the shortest is three words long and the longest is about a page and a half. In fact, at a presentation in Burgas, I met a Greek translator who told me he’d managed to get some of my short stories published in a few anthologies. In short, it’s a bit of a chaotic time at the moment. Autumn is distracting me. I’m waiting for the rains so I can carry on writing my new novel uninterrupted.’ From poetry to the novel Things weren’t always like this, though. Because Georgi Gospodinov started out as a poet, and an award-winning one at that. What drove him to the novel? ‘Ah, back when I wrote only poetry, that was the golden age. And I still wonder why on earth anyone decides to write novels. Human life is far too short for truly great novels; I mean the great ones, not the lengthy ones. All the more so for someone who writes slowly when tackling this genre, like me. Essentially, though, I don’t think I ever abandoned poetry. Even when I write novels, which are quite mad, I always try to slip my poetry into them, secretly and surreptitiously. My first, *The Natural Novel*, was a direct result of what I’m telling you. I had never written prose before. I told myself I had the right to fail; I felt free; I wanted to give it a go and then return to poetry. And completely unexpectedly, the novel began to cross borders and was translated into around 20 languages, which surprised me a little. I didn’t like, of course, the mould of such a job, being confined to a single genre and producing a novel every two years. That is precisely why I continued to write poetry, short stories, plays, a libretto for an opera or a graphic novel. Until I had accumulated enough stories for the next novel. The good thing about the novel, as I understand it, is that it can encompass all the other genres like a womb. The novel is like Noah’s Ark. And in exactly the same way, ‘On the Nature of Melancholy’ emerged.The History of Melancholy This book has a labyrinthine form. Why? ‘The labyrinth is the natural form taken by our narratives, but also by our lives. Start telling a story, for example, and you will soon realise how often you stop, go back, unconsciously veer off in other directions, and take side paths. That is the form! And I wanted my novel to follow it because there is a voice in the book, that of the protagonist, which narrates in the first person the stories of his father and grandfather, the story of the Minotaur, but also the story of melancholy, not only of the 20th century but of the present day as well. Tell me, was there any way for all this not to be a labyrinth? The labyrinth is situated more vertically in time than in space. So there are no postmodern traps here. On the contrary, I address the readers directly and tell them, ‘this is where we stop’. Because we no longer write our novels as we did in the 19th century, and I say this with some disappointment. The novel, however, is not a train that departs from point A to arrive linearly at point B. The novel is a labyrinth into which we all enter of our own free will to set free, within its corridors, our own Minotaurs, our demons and our fears. There are solitary Minotaurs lurking within each of us.’Childhood abandonmentGeorgi Gospodinov forces us to see a side of the Minotaur that many of us had not even considered, namely his ‘silenced story’. ‘If we read the myth carefully, with a little compassion, we will discover an incredible injustice that has long been concealed. The Minotaur was, in fact, an abandoned child, who at the age of 3 or 4 was locked away by his father, Minos, in the underground chamber. I have read everything in ancient literature concerning the Minotaur and found not a shred of mercy for him, beyond ‘monster’, ‘shame’ and so on. The theme of child abandonment is one of the book’s central themes. The first image that came to mind when I started writing it was a memory of myself as a young lad in a small town in southern Bulgaria in the 1970s. I’m sitting by the window. Our home was a single room, located in the basement – or rather, the semi-basement. The window was at street level; my parents hadn’t come home from work yet. I was alone and scared, curled up on the windowsill, watching the last light of the late afternoon. Behind me, inside the room, a thick darkness stretched out. I entered this memory as I was thinking about the novel and, at some point, I realised that there was another such creature living alone in a dark labyrinth. In this way, the Minotaur boy of myth and the Minotaur boy from the 1970s came together in my text. That is where it all began. “It is, however, also a novel that highlights, I believe, both the shift in our perspective and the importance of empathy, which helps us to see others with fresh eyes,” emphasised the Bulgarian author.The narrator in the book, his alter ego, suffers from ‘pathological empathy or obsessive empathic-somatic syndrome’. It may sound frightening, but it is absolutely essential. ‘I cannot imagine how anyone could write fiction without this hyper-empathy. In the novel, this ability—or affliction—is the way in which the protagonist enters into the stories of his ancestors, as well as into the bodies of other living things.”We then discussed with Georgi Gospodinov the incredible scene in which he describes the ‘living museum of socialism’ with his compatriots. He had previously edited a volume with the telling title I Lived Through Socialism – 171 Personal Stories. Is there such a thing as positive and negative nostalgia? ‘As a writer, collecting personal stories is of the utmost importance to me. Bulgarian ‘real socialism’ appeared peaceful and mild, yet, like any totalitarian regime, it eroded and corrupted each individual. In reality, people feel nostalgia for their past and their youth, but in a foolish way they believe, or have been conditioned to believe, that their youth and ‘real socialism’ are naturally intertwined. ‘Well, they aren’t!’ emphasised the author, who, moreover, makes some apt observations about ‘small nations’ and their syndromes. Are there, correspondingly, such literary syndromes? ‘The periphery is full of stories and, often, the way in which its writers tell them is far bolder than that of the centre. The problem is stereotypes. For example, I once received the following response from a major Western publishing house regarding *On the Nature of Melancholy*: ‘Your novel is very good, but it isn’t Eastern European enough.’The Neighbours’ SyndromeIn the end, we wondered together why, even though we are so close, we know so little about one another. ‘Ancient Greek literature and philosophy were part of my literary education and, over time, became part of my personal interests. Especially from the twentieth century onwards, Cavafy, Seferis and Kazantzakis were an essential part of my reading as a young man. To be honest, however, I am not very familiar with the literary output in Greece over the last three decades, just as I imagine you do not know much about contemporary Bulgarian literature. This is a typical neighbourly syndrome; neighbours usually don’t take much interest in one another. A lack of curiosity and a host of stereotypes. A while ago, a writer from Central Europe said, with great arrogance, that no one expects a great novel from Bulgaria, at most a tomato of exceptional quality. That’s how you talk if you’ve internalised the stereotypes. In any case, I think the situation has started to change. If you’re a Bulgarian who travels to Greece quite often, or the other way round, a Greek who frequently visits Bulgaria, and you’ve tasted a good wine, the local fish or tomatoes, the moment will inevitably come when you seek something more, something to read about this country or to become a little more curious about other issues concerning it. I have the feeling that this is the moment we are in right now, Bulgarians and Greeks alike.”