Dinner With Persephone | Granta

  • Published: 13/07/1998
  • ISBN: 9781862070523
  • 130x20mm
  • 416 pages

Dinner With Persephone

Patricia Storace

This volume explores the complicated relationship between the idea of classical Greece and the messy, Mediterranean reality of a country unsure of its place in the world. Modern Greece is the strangest nation in Europe, insisting on its privileged place as the “cradle of democracy”, while offering a less-than-perfect form of democracy to its own minorities and its female population. This is the country that turned itself upside down over the adoption of the name of “Macedonia” by a former Yugoslav republic, as though Alexander the Great’s nationality were a matter of extreme contemporary urgency. Patricia Storace begins by telling of her first day in Greece. She brings to bear on modern Greece a deep knowledge of the classics, of the Greek myths and of Greek Christianity. She is the author o f “Heredity”, a book of poems.

It dances easily into historic time past, personal time present, the calendar of the still shapely Greek year, the deepest meanings of language.

Guardian

She writes with the love that it is, even amid exasperation, impossible not to feel for this extraordinary people... haunting and beautifully written.

New York Review of Books

The Author

Patricia Storace is a poet and frequent contributor to the New York Review of Books and Condé Nast Traveller. She is the author of Dinner with Persephone, a travel book hailed as one of the finest ever written about Greece. She lives in New York.

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