Kadmo

Kadmo reads as a literary photo album of a woman who was modern as a writer, politically courageous, and privately uncompromising. The narrative voice of the thirteen chapters-fragments of her lived or narrated life-describes in second person the grief and anxiety of a Greek woman in exile at losing the memory of her homeland and mother tongue. The novel is at once a journey through postwar Europe, but also through the life and work of the narrator: of her childhood in Mykonos and her youth in Athens before World War II, of her exile in Paris, East Berlin and Warsaw, and then of her return to Greece in 1964. The unusual name "Kadmo," which resembles the author's first name and refers to the autobiographical elements of the novel, recalls Kadmos from Greek mythology, who sets out to find his ger.