YANNIS CIRPAS
While you wait for it to happen
ed.. Gutenberg, page 128

Nine years have passed since Yiannis Cirbas (b. 1976) tried his hand at literature with the unexpected success of Victoria Doesn’t Exist (2013). With a dense narrative rhythm and an expansive socio-political look, Tsirbas shrewdly captured a deeply rooted social and moral pathology. Paradoxically, the current book may have preceded the novella, as it is difficult to determine the intensity with which the then-debutant made an impression. The characters in the stories seem to be perverted in their own right, yet they do not hesitate to openly and vulgarly project their selfishness. The man openly admits that the reason he broke off one relationship after another was because he did not have enough words to flatter himself. She struggled to tell anyone else. “To say again how beautiful I made myself. It’s satisfaction.” Sexual relations are the great suffering of heroes. They are either nostalgic or fantasize about crazy combinations. Love attraction is stimulated during adolescence when young students fall in love with a classmate or vacationing peer. A fifteen-year-old teenager’s vacation turns into a hell of shame and self-pity when, due to an accident, he is expelled not only from summer society, but also from the heart of his beloved. The story unfolds in the form of a diary that tells of a pain-stricken teenager’s departure from summer and his descent into autumn. Another student was more fortunate, because in the last hour of Friday he was sitting at the same desk with his girlfriend. For at least one hour, he experienced the absolute male triumph of ejaculation. Other innocent lovers have it worse, because they fearfully suspect how difficult it will be to get rid of their virginity, from this “tickle of their peaches.” That “familiar tickle down there” becomes a redeeming spasm for the aching body as the inconsolable beings’ special therapist takes care of the penis, the only thriving part of the mangled flesh. The story clearly nods in the direction of Sotiris Dimitriou, despite all this and despite the blatant injustice of the comparison, it is worth reading. The best story in the collection is the opening one, as it eludes the cares of childhood and youth, more suitable for a student’s notebook. Here the narrator resorts to his nimble broom to keep the memory of another house where he lived something like family happiness. To cheat the loss, he regulates the janitor’s walk around the cramped quarters of the current house based on the mnemonic imprint of the floor plan of the abandoned apartment.

What weighs in Chirba’s collection is the unbearable boredom of storytellers. “Deep boredom.” “I’m tired of being bored.” Their weariness has less to do with the dawn of youth than with the destruction of their former glory, their penis. It seems that their whole life, as they move towards maturity and decline, is reduced to the protests and complaints of this body. And it’s really hard to understand how in a decade a promising author wrote just one little book, with banal, if not childish, reflections. Worst of all, even the language is twisted by the mental boredom of the narrators, crawling into short, sharp phrases that do not constitute style at all. In a word, Tsirbas remains the author of a good book. Let’s stick with it.