Reading Club: Child of God

In October, the SNFCC Reading Club continues its meetings, facilitated by writer Dimosthenis Papamarkos.

Dimosthenis Papamarkos was born in 1983 in Malesina of Locris. He studied Ancient Greek History in Athens and Oxford. He has published novels, short stories and graphic novels. In 2014, his short story collection Ghiak, which has been translated into Russian and German, earned him the Petros Haris Foundation / Academy of Athens award, as well as the award for best Short Story/Novella of the magazine Anagnostis. Papamarkos has also written theater and screenplays, and has translated classical Greek dramas for productions of the National Theater of Greece and the Athens and Epidaurus Festival. While an Onassis Artistic Research Fellow, he wrote the theatrical play Ston Koraka. He works as a content creator for projects of the Faliro House film productions company.

The Reading Club meeting will be held in the presence of the translator of the book of the month, Panagiotis Kehagias.

October: Child of God, Cormac McCarthy 

Ballard is a bedraggled farmer in Tennessee. When he is evicted from his farm, which will be sold at auction, he will seek refuge in an abandoned farmhouse. But that house too will be destroyed in a wildfire, so Ballard will be forced to live in one of the area’s caves. Outcast and practically exiled by the local community, he will be deprived of any means of survival. To secure a living, he will initially resort to petty crimes, whose frequency and gravity will escalate until they eventually lead him up to his first murder. From then on, Ballard will be out of control. He will completely surrender to his instincts and satisfy his every morbid and inhumane desire, without any sort of barrier or hesitation. Child of God, first published in 1973, belongs to the early works of Cormac McCarthy. It is a novel whose relatively small size is inversely proportional to its power. It is an extraordinarily bold treatise on the nature of elemental evil and its compatibility with human nature. Child of God is a work that does not conceal extreme violence and cruelty behind literary allusions. It is not interested in preserving the condition of a misconceived decorum vis-à-vis the reader. Its author seeks—and succeeds—to make this read as realistic a simulation of the reality it explores as possible: a plunge into the heart of darkness, a personal acquaintance with the evil that resides at the core of human nature.

Bio
Cormac McCarthy (born Charles Joseph McCarthy Jr.) was an American writer, labeled by many the “best unknown novelist in America.” He was born in 1933, in Providence, Rhode Island, but grew up in Tennessee. In 1951, he enrolled in the University of Tennessee School of Fine Arts, but dropped out in 1953 to join the US Air Force. He returned to college in 1957, to eventually drop out for good in 1959. However, it was during the first period of attending college that he discovered his interest in writing, publishing his first short stories in the University of Tennessee student literary magazine, The Phoenix. His first novel, The Orchard Keeper, was published a few years later, and in 1966 it won the William Faulkner Foundation Award. Then came the novels Outer Dark (1968), Child of God (1973), Suttree (1979), Blood Meridian, or the Evening Redness in the West (1985) and, in 1992, All the Pretty Horses was published to great critical and public acclaim, winning him the US National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award and ultimately securing him widespread recognition. His reputation grew further, thanks to both his excellent novels that followed (indicatively: The Crossing, 1994; Cities of the Plain, 1998; No Country for Old Men, 2005; The Road, 2006, etc.) and to the successful film adaptations of many of them. His oeuvre was revisited and studied anew and in depth by the critics, notably by Harold Bloom, who determined that McCarthy could only be compared to the “great” American Authors like Herman Melville and William Faulkner. His literary voice is distinguished for its uniqueness, due to both his idiosyncratic writing and the choice of his subjects. And if Blood Meridian has been recognized as “the Great American Novel” of the postwar years, Cormac McCarthy stands out for one more reason: he belonged to those few writers who have managed to present the human nature and the human condition with great boldness and clarity.

Monday 30/10
18.30-20.30
NLG Book Castle
For adults | Up to 30 participants

Free admission, online preregistration required 

The book is published by Gutenberg publications (in Greek). 

To participate in the Reading Club, it is necessary for those who hold a position to have read the book of the month. (It is also useful to have it with them).