VICKI CELEPIDU
120 grams
ed. Nepheli, page 176

We can say that there is no more boring place than a notary’s office. Vicky Tselepidu, however, has a different opinion. He imagined the notary’s office as the highest literary place, a place where life and death ruthlessly compete. Those who go there claim that they are legally protected from all kinds of torts of reality. With a contract, a transfer, a power of attorney, a will, a signature, they hope to feel more secure in the face of terrible difficulties. The protagonist of the book is a notary who manages a multimodal contingency. In 120 gram cream-striped adhesives, he solves all the failures of his generally pathogenic existence. The man wants to give his name as the only name of the meteorite that hit his farm. Another is interested in knowing the value of his mountainside vine but refuses to sell it to the man who has been growing it for years. He felt that by selling the vineyard, he would encroach on the land where his father was buried. A retired notary public excitedly tells his colleague about the recently deceased legendary magician. He was certain that opening the house would reveal signs and monsters, the magic that had blinded his childhood. A woman destroys her adventurous family life, which was brutally cut short by a parrot she obsessively cared for like an only child. A man mourns repeated losses, tearing down his possessions floor by floor. The persons speaking to the notary have no face, they are disembodied voices that do not interact with each other. Their short history does not allow them to develop into characters. That’s why I was impressed by the designation “novel” on the cover. Individual moments do not add up to a larger composition, they are simply individual episodes of everyday life with minor or major disasters, minor or critical problems. An element that reinforces the heterogeneity of the narratives is their stylistic differentiation, underlined by different fonts. Celepidou tries a variety of styles, unsophisticated spoken language, asthmatic, insane, unaccountable, bureaucratic, legalistic, priestly purgatory, rough, old-fashioned pronunciation, with, of course, no shortage of dopiolals and dialects. This linguistic display has nothing to do with fiction. Neither a novel nor a collection of short stories, the book of Tselepidu follows the events in the notary’s office, fragmentarily fixing the distinction between life and death by bureaucratic framework. The last pages are interesting, where the silent, indifferent notary gains a sudden presence when she takes on the case of a man who has been hell for her for four years. The man who destroyed her professional dignity with his signature was suffering from a degenerative disease and therefore wanted to sign a power of attorney to recognize his wife as capable. Reading the wishes of his client, the notary got the feeling that the patient wants to”[…] to exhaust reality, to push it to the limit, something impossible, which however her new client had the courage to try, trying here and there to predict all the possible scenarios of his life. Lost opportunity. Tselepidu left the best story for last, which in itself could turn into a readable novella. A short page testimonial to the writing, which, however, is not enough to guarantee the whole as a literary work.