L Enfant Grec

The Greek Child Under option in Bulgaria and Russia
Greek language rights reserved This is the story of a constant to-and-fro between two gardens, between a childhood spent in the Kallithea quarter of Athens, and the Jardin du Luxembourg in Paris where the narrator makes painful progress, supported by crutches. He has just had a major operation but no one shows any interest now except for the woman who runs the park's toilets, a homeless man called Ricardo, the lady director of the puppet theatre and a white-haired old man who looks like Jean Valjean. His loneliness eventually makes his childhood heroes appear around him, some who really did tread the paths of the Jardin du Luxembourg, such as Jean Valjean and the three musketeers, but also Tarzan who can't understand why people have built houses around the park when there's so much room for them in the trees. There are also orphans, pirates and Indians, as well as Richelieu who watches over this little universe from his window in the nearby government buildings. And finally death, represented by a giant puppet dressed in white, with hen's feet instead of hands; and a beautiful Italian woman cast in bronze.
Muted noise from the outside world reaches the gardens: the cries of young protesters demonstrating on Constitution Square in Athens, and news that Zorba danced in the Bundestag in front of the German Parliament. As novelists seem to like sending their characters underground into the sewers or down burrows, the story ends in the catacombs. Jean Valjean is kind enough to carry the narrator on his back. As you may have guessed, the central character of this novel is literature.
Vassilis Alexakis has published, amongst others, Paris-Athènes, La langue maternelle (winner of the 1995 Prix Médicis), les mots étrangers, Ap. J. - C. (Winner of the 2007 Grand Prix for a novel from the Académie française) and Le Premier mot. L'enfant grec is his fourteenth novel.