THE OLD CURIOSITY SHOP

A story of the passion between a man of fifty- plus and a girl of nineteen, a seemingly not unusual situation were it not for the fact that everything that takes place between the two protagonists is constantly and faithfully recorded by someone else: the mature "grey" woman who is the man's past and who chronicles the lovers' passion with adoration and respect. The place is Salonica, the Old Curiosity Shop, Africa and the prevailing element is Passion, destructive, merciless, rapacious, without inhibitions or objections until the End. This End which is their life in a state of decay and which, moment by moment, passes through the eyes of the "grey woman", a road parallel to that of city life and so very solitary. Their real end is not some sort of fate that awaits them or an ordinary death; it is not a catastrophe or a normal ending for a newspaper story. Daring, harsh, rough and at the same time intensely erotic, Costoula Mitropoulou's book is yet another deep incision into the eternal problem of human relations and of Passion that ends only with our own end.