The School Mistress with the Golden Eyes

Here, among ‘the most erotic landscapes in the world’, Stratis Myrivilis has set his modern rendering of the legend of Sappho. Leonis Drivas returns from war. The springs of feeling have so dried in him that even the news of his mother’s death with which his younger sister greets his homecoming cannot draw his tears. Like many before him, he sets himself to pick up the quiet thread of life and to exorcise the memories through his painting. First, however, he has a duty to perform. His friend Varnas, who died a death of putrefying horror beside him in the military hospital, has entrusted him with a wallet to return to his widow. Sappho Vranas, the schoolmistress with the golden eyes, is not the simple peasant girl he expected to find. Those who read THE MERMAID MADDONNA will need no second invitation to open this second, related book. Like his artist hero, Stratis Myrivilis has ‘something altogether new and personal in his work, as if two undefiled eyes have opened for the first time and looked at life with wonder and awe.’