Cahiers Balkaniques (Jan 2018)

La « crise grecque » dans l’Ultime Humiliation de Rhéa Galanaki

  • Loïc Marcou

DOI
https://doi.org/10.4000/ceb.9850
Journal volume & issue
Vol. 44

Abstract

Read online

Since 2008, Greece is facing one of the most serious crises in its history. This financial bankruptcy, which is also a social and humanitarian disaster, is fueling an interesting albeit uneven literary production. In The Ultimate Humiliation, her last book, Rhea Galanaki (1947‑), one of the greatest contemporary novelists, offers a radiograph of the "Greek crisis" in a polyphonic novel featuring characters representative of the current Greek society: two retired ladies damaged by life and turned into beggars, a crooked politician, an anarchist fighting against the political establishment, a neo‑Nazi prompt to fight against strangers and migrants, an immigrant housekeeper, a devoted female social worker. What interpretation Rhea Galanaki, always very attentive to the upheavals of the Greek society, proposes on the so‑called "Greek crisis"? More generally, what are the social uses of contemporary Modern Greek literature?

Keywords