DIMITRIS TERZIS
Grandpa by the fireplace
ed. Polis, page 176

“I curse my tongue in and the tongues of the whole world!”. The man lies down, having no words to explain the extravagance of death. Others are more persistent, some are smiling. A mother writes to her dead child, trying to speak in a light tone so as not to upset him. “I often wonder if you’re laughing where you are.” The woman learns that she will soon die, but does not take it to heart. What burns her is to see how many women in black will come to cry for her, so she organizes an early funeral. The grandfather, locked in an urn, laughs at the funeral rite that his eldest son performs to put him on the mantelpiece. The funeral procession and the wedding procession intersect on the Sicilian road. Who is really ahead? Death or life?

In his short stories Dimitris Terzis death grazes without sowing darkness around. The name of the prose collection is characteristic, where the mournful solemnity that the patriarch of the family tries to impose on the occasion is violated by the carelessness of the deceased, intoxicated with the unexpected joys of eternity. The setting is also farcical in the story “He Who Burns”, one of the best in the collection. The couple heads to the Sicilian village of Posilipo. The man is irritated. “When the hell are we going to get to the damn pausilipo?” Until a “dotted line” appears, divided into two opposite directions. From one side a hearse drives up, from the other, a wedding procession decorated with flowers. Faced with this unpleasant but so ordinary intersection, the narrator takes on the duties of a traffic inspector, with hilariously tragic but ultimately happy results. Terzis has been a political reporter for many years and this is the fourth collection. short stories from.

Recently book he traverses the odysseys of mortality with a subcutaneous irony that masks pain. Often, however, idleness in the face of nonexistence may hide a desire for death. Fotini, for example, in “The Last Night of the World” yearns to go out. He looks forward to a fiery meteor that will turn the world to ashes. “Fotini wanted to finish for a long time, but did not find the strength.” He could not even find the strength to dig into her, open a hole in her soul, which was in pain, and bury her ashes there, “every ah, who did not breathe to go out into the world.”

A pacemaker arrives at a meeting with a suicidal patient, monologues in the delightful story “Pulse”. The high-tech machine feels humiliated by its owner’s unwillingness to breathe. This absurd refusal to survive shorted out the pacemaker. “We all know that no one wants to die.” According to its specifications: “Death is a mistake, an aberration.” Obviously, in Terzi’s obituaries, as in life, death is not the only deviation.

The author refracts his view through a prism that reveals the closeness of tragedy and comedy. Tragedy is not far from merriment, and this discreet approach is shown with ingenuity in Terzis’ writings. Even on the verge of sobbing, muffled laughter can be heard. Watching the constant conflict between life and death, the heroes of the collection find the courage to smile. The epilogue of the stories sounds like a half-laughter of reconciliation with the unbearable.