A01=Amanda Michalopoulou
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Author_Amanda Michalopoulou
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B06=Patricia Felisa Barbeito
captive heroine
Category1=Fiction
Category=FA
Category=FB
Category=FQ
confessional
COP=United States
creativity
deception
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divine
divinity
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
feminism
god
greece
greek
heresy
IL
intimate
Language_English
love
marriage
metafiction
PA=Available
power
Price_€10 to €20
PS=Active
psychological
SN=Greek Literature
softlaunch
theology
wife
Product details
- ISBN 9781628973372
- Dimensions: 139 x 215mm
- Publication Date: 13 Feb 2020
- Publisher: Dalkey Archive Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Paperback
- Language: English
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Amanda Michalopoulou’s God’s Wife is a deceptive novel: it draws us close with promises of titillating confession and heart-warming intimacy only to send us on a conceptual scavenger hunt that probes the ethics of reading, writing, and the unspoken conventions of literary mastery.
“It sounds like a lie, but I am His wife,” is the arresting opening declaration made by the novel’s unnamed narrator, who will always be known through her role as an appendage, “at His side.” This premise—bringing to mind as it does the very origins of the western novel: epistolary novels of romance as both salvation and captivity—immediately also raises issues of power, domination, truth and belief. God’s Wife, then, is ultimately a meditation on the power of literature to create a space of imaginative play. It is a love story, a philosophical treatise on the nature of faith and divinity, a self-conscious meditation on the nature of writing and creativity, and a feminist tract all rolled into one. What holds all these strands together is what can only be described as the compelling authenticity of the narrator’s voice and her relentless focus on the role of femininity as performance and convention in literature. Her voice is, of course, shaped by Michalopoulou’s inimitably spare, elegant and masterfully evocative prose, which like the narrator’s mother’s brand of storytelling, uses few words and eschews didacticism.
Amanda Michalopoulou is the internationally acclaimed author of several books of fiction, two of which have previously been published in English: I’d Like (Dalkey Archive Press, 2008) and Why I Killed My Best Friend (2014), both translated by Karen Emmerich. Her work, which has been translated into twenty languages, has been awarded the Diavazo Novel Prize, the Academy of Athens Award, and the International Literature Award by the National Endowment for the Arts among others. She lives in Athens, Greece. Patricia Felisa Barbeito is Professor of American Literatures at the Rhode Island School of Design. Her translations include?Their Smell Makes Me Want to Cry(Birmingham Modern Greek Translations,2004), ?The Interrogation (Birmingham Modern Greek Translations, 2013), and The Great Chimera (Aiora, 2019).
