Landscape with Dog

by Ersi Sotiropoulos, Karen Emmerich (Translator)

"Let's just say that Giacometti was setting out to draw a face. If he started with the chin, he would worry that he might never reach the nose. The longer he sketched the face, the harder he tried to offer a faithful representation of it, the more it resembled a skull. The only thing left was the gaze. So what he ended up drawing was a skull with a gaze.

Landscape with Dog and Other Stories is made up of countless such moments: transformations of the everyday, encounters between the known and the unknowable. Contemporary Athens wavers before us; the outlines of a sketch darken and blur; the face of a friend is at once beloved and strange. In Ersi Sotiropoulos's prose, the slightest event, the slightest change in the quality of the light, can alter everything. Karen Emmerich brings perfectly into English the precise, vibrant movement of Sotiropoulos's language, the mastery that has made her one of Greece's most acclaimed writers. These stories will be praised for their flashes of beauty and their crackles of dark humor, but what makes them so memorable is something else, impossible to pin down, something like the gaze of the skull. At once familiar and troubling, compelling and unapproachable, Sotiropoulos's stories give us a new way of seeing.

Genres: Greece, Fiction, Short Stories

168 pages, Paperback

First published November 1, 2009

About the author

Greek: Έρση Σωτηροπούλου

Reviews

[Kätlin Kaldmaa · Rating 5 out of 5]

What! A! Wo! Man!

Absolutely fabulous short stories by one of my favorite Greek contemporary writers. Her works need to be translated into more languages.

[Sahar · Rating 5 out of 5]

برای من با همون لحنی که فکر میکنم بود و عالی و بیشتر پر از آهنگ هایی بود که با خودم زمزمه میکنم یا در سرم است ....

It's not your fault

It's sold and bought

Take it in stride....

[Greg · Rating 3 out of 5]

Were Raymond Carver a 21st-century Greek woman, he might have written stories like these by Ersi Sotiropoulos. Small epiphanies, small impasses between siblings, girlfriends, and couples, between mothers and grown children. That take place in apartment kitchens, cafés, small European cars, even on the way from the kitchen to the café in a small European car. And a couple of somewhat stranger stories just to enliven the mix.

I began reading with those inexplicable reservations which can (but luckily didn't) prevent one from picking up a book at all. I paced myself, a story or two at a time, but toward the end was racing through them, unable to stop. The writing reminded me of I'd Like, Amanda Michalopoulou's fluid and unpredictable novel-in-stories, which made Three Percent's list last year. It wasn't a surprise then to find that one translator, Karen Emmerich, did both.

On Three Percent's longlist for 2010 Best Translated Book Award.

[Santhi · Rating 2 out of 5]

#readaroundtheworld #LitWorld2018GB
Greece - 2

Some macabre, plenty heartbreak make up the daily mundane... Couple of stories made me pause and ponder but the vignettes were mostly unexciting for me

[Katherine · Rating 3 out of 5]

*3.25 stars.

[H]

“Let’s just say that Giacometti was setting out to draw a face. If he started with the chin, he would worry that he might never reach the nose. The longer he sketched the face, the harder he tried to offer a faithful representation of it, the more it resembled a skull. The only thing left was the gaze. So what he ended up drawing was a skull with a gaze."

Landscape with Dog and Other Stories is made up of countless such moments: transformations of the everyday, encounters between the known and the unknowable. Contemporary Athens wavers before us; the outlines of a sketch darken and blur; the face of a friend is at once beloved and strange. In Ersi Sotiropoulos’s prose, the slightest event, the slightest change in the quality of the light, can alter everything. Karen Emmerich brings perfectly into English the precise, vibrant movement of Sotiropoulos’s language, the mastery that has made her one of Greece’s most acclaimed writers. These stories will be praised for their flashes of beauty and their crackles of dark humor, but what makes them so memorable is something else, impossible to pin down, something like the gaze of the skull. At once familiar and troubling, compelling and unapproachable, Sotiropoulos’s stories give us a new way of seeing.

[Deb · Rating 3 out of 5]

Rich, sparse short stories. A little ironic, a little dark. Skillful writing that held my attention.

"There's no such thing as experience. We learn nothing." From "Freehand," opening story.

[Babak vahedi · Rating 4 out of 5]

In this amazing collection of short stories, Ersi Sotiropoulos invites us to explore the odd yet familiar culture of greece and her people.