In 1984, Lyacos set about writing the first installment of what would later become the Poena Damni trilogy. Classified as postmodern and cross-genre, Poena Damni is referred to as one of the salient examples of the fragmentation technique - despite, however, its postmodern affinities, it is also construed in line with the High Modernist tradition setting aside the postmodern playfulness for a serious and earnest handling of the subject.
Lyacos's characters are always at a distance from society as fugitives, like the narrator of Z213: Exit, outcasts in a dystopian hinterland like the characters in With the people from the bridge, or marooned, like the protagonist of The First Death whose struggle for survival unfolds on a desertlike island. Poena Damni, is arranged around a cluster of concepts including the scapegoat, the quest, the return of the dead, redemption, physical suffering, and mental illness. Renowned for its genre-defying form and the avant-garde combination of themes from literary tradition with elements from ritual, religion, philosophy and anthropology, Lyacos's work reexamines grand narratives in the context of some of the enduring motifs of the Western Canon. 1966) is the author of the Poena Damni trilogy.
Although evidently post-modernist, this is a book that does not undermine or shrink the traditional Grand Narrative themes on the contrary, it thrives on them.ĭimitris Lyacos (b. Horror is created by the scantiest vocabulary craftily combined to form a broken, unstructured syntax, seemingly tight, but leaving enough loopholes through which the reader’s subconscious fears can pop in and out.
Written in a unique prose style, at times bordering on poetry and conveying a “pilgrimage of the soul” through a series of increasingly haunting pieces, Z213: EXIT creates the feeling that reader and narrator are led together through an eschatological experience. As if waking up in a nightmare an escapee recounts his fleeting experiences in a series of fragmented diary entries in a hide-and-seek game with Death or even God. Z213: EXIT is the first installment of the Poena Damni trilogy: a camp, a train, soldiers, a Bible with notes inside, encroaching darkness, the struggle to remember, the struggle of hiding, physical pain.
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