Corfiot Tales - Konstantinos Theotokis

This is the first English translation of the complete Corfiot Tales - translated by J. M. Q. Davies

Konstantinos Theotokis (1872-1923), a Corfiot aristocrat turned socialist, writing on the threshold of the modern era as the Ionian Islands emerged from centuries of Venetian and British rule, portrays the harsh lives of the local peasantry and the decline of their Italianized overlords in fiction of great power, humour and compassion. His most personal work, Slaves in their chains, considered the first major urban social novel in demotic Greek, chronicles a noble family's descent into debt, dishonour, suicide and madness on the eve of the First World War.

His intense unsentimental Corfiot Tales are rich in local colour but transcend the ethnographic by focusing on the primary passions, and include some the most hair-raising stories of obsession, illicit love and honour killings ever written. Funny, harrowing and lyrical by turns, the tales portray a closed, clannish, fiercely patriarchal society crying out for change, in which the father, the church and public opinion hold sway, women are victimized and life is governed by time honoured rituals, the changing season and the decrees of fate.