Commune, The

The final novel by Marios Chakkas, one of Greece's most well-known and evocative writers. A legend in his home country of Greece but virtually unknown abroad, The Commune is the final work of Marios Chakkas, composed in the months preceding his early death in 1972. Chakkas was born under the Fascist regime and reared as a socialist revolutionary, and The Commune is his reckoning with the uncertainty of the past and the madness of the present as the military junta secures its position and the spirit of the socialist insurrection fades. Returning from political exile, Chakkas confronts the decay and ruin of his Athenian neighborhood as he recounts childhood gunfights in the streets, churches filled with asbestos, vanished comrades, and violent squabbles over memorials for executed partisans in his singular voice which swerves from scorching poetic indignation to gallows humor to metaphysical meditation.