Poet, novelist, civil servant, and powerful political figure, Alexandros Kapantais is a soap bubble. He is the impostor who, thirsting for power, manages through entanglement to climb the upper ranks of the Greek public sector and impose himself as a so-called leading figure in the Greek intellectual scene. He represents a society that steadily paves its own way toward the cliff.
Within an intense twenty-four hours, on April 21, 1983—a day that will honor his forty years of contribution to literature by the Ministry of Culture—Kapantais feverishly struggles to balance ministerial meetings, a rendezvous with his lover, a stop at the publishing house delaying his new poetry collection, a visit to the hospital where his only true friend is dying, and the appeasement of his “requisitioned,” by the ministry, biographer. Until, finally, he reaches the Municipal Cultural Center and everything changes…
With the hilarious yet bitter “Fantastic Adventure,” many years before the bankruptcy crisis of 2010, Alexandros Kotzias warns of the signs of decay in post-junta Greece. In its new edition, his ironic, sarcastic, and ever-relevant seventh novel, the book includes extensive commentary by Michail S. Kalavrou, a rich anthology of critical notes, and a closing note by Eleni Kehayioglou.
State Novel Prize 1986
“The ever-intervening discourse of biographical research (marriage certificates, newspaper and magazine clippings, speeches, critical excerpts, letters, interviews with acquaintances and friends), constantly moving across different time levels, pierces the point of intersection of the whole novel: it proves the false (sometimes intentional, sometimes not) memory of Kapantais and comments, without making a moral judgment, on his ideological opportunism and his conscious flexibility in all eras and under any circumstances.” VANGELIS CHATZIVASILEIOU, Avgi, January 19, 1986
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