THE OLD CURIOSITY SHOP

A story of the passion between a man of fifty "plus" and a girl of nineteen, a seemingly not unusual situation were it not for the fact that everything that takes place between the two "protagonists* is constantly and faithfully recorded by someone: the mature "grey" woman who is the man's past and who chronicles the lovers' passion with adoration and respect. The place is Salonica, the Old Curiosity Shop, Africa and the prevailing element is Passion, destructive, merciless, rapacious, without inhibitions and "objections" until the End. This End which is their life in a state of decay and which moment by moment passes through the eyes of the "grey woman", a road parallet to that of city life and so very solitary. Their real find is not some sort of fate that awaits them or an ordinary death; it is not catastrophe or a normal ending for a newspaper story.

Daring, harsh, rough and at the same time intensely erotic, Costoula Mitropoulou's book is yet another deep incision into the enernal problem of human relations and of the Passion that ends only with our own end.