Cavafy's Stone and Other Village Tales — Harry Mark Petrakis

In its play of voices reminiscent of the Winesburg, Ohio of Sherwood Anderson, this sequence of tales from a Greek village is at once tragic, moving, and poetic. The linked stories in which the inhabitants of the village of Fanaron in central Greece spin their tangled tales of love, hate, vengeance and despair create a microcosm of the world. The old village priest has his life impacted by the vision of a lovely young tourist bathing naked in a mountain stream; a homosexual schoolteacher trapped in the rigid mores of the village finds comfort in a small stone that once belonged to the Alexandrian poet Cavafy; a girl marries the handsomest man in the village only to discover he is a brutal wife-beater; two sisters compete for the love of the same man with tragic consequences; a father is tormented by aberrant feelings toward his young daughter; a young woman discovers her grandmother s dark secret from the time of the German occupation in World War II ; a single act of infidelity causes a farmer a lifetime of anguish; an immigrant who found wealth in the U.S. returns to the village in a sporty Cadillac that cannot fit in its narrow village streets. The storytelling craft of Harry Mark Petrakis, praised by writers such as Elie Wiesel, Kurt Vonnegut, and Isaac Bashevis Singer, is poignantly and skillfully evidenced in these tales taking place in a land where three of the world s four great tragedians once wrote their plays.