Aris Marangopoulos

Who is Aris Marangopoulos?

Aris Marangopoulos is a Greek author, literary critic and translator. He studied History and Archeology at the University of Athens, History of Art and Archeology at the University of Paris 1 Pantheon-Sorbonne.

He is one of the few modernist / postmodernist writers of prose in Greece and has been writing since the early eighties. Most of his novels deal with the Utopian idea of communal love as a means of civil disobedience and some of them include whole pages or, in some cases, whole chapters, written in an elective modernist style resembling a poème en prose. Vassilis Vassilikos, author of the novel Z, has written for Maragkopoulos' political novel Obsession with Spring:

«It is the outcome of a difficult journey through the clashing rocks of James Joyce and Jorge Luis Borges, a fruitful journey that made him rediscover Honoré de Balzac’s gold… A fantastic political thriller, an anatomy of the country we call Hellas, a novel that opens a wide discussion amid the reading community since it re-reads our recent history»

His best novel so far, as most critics agree, The Slap-tree, is a book that reviews post-war Greece through the eyes of a foreign woman, a Welsh teacher who during WW II fell in love with a young Greek communist and thereafter put every possible effort to free him from an incarceration of 17 years. Apart from its literary merits the story has ignited a certain discussion and dispute in Greece as to the possible ways of narrating historic facts in literature.