The Life and Death of Hangman Thomas - Konstantinos Theotokis

This is the first English translation of The Life and Death of Hangman Thomas - translated by J. M. Q. Davies.

Konstantinos Theotokis, a Corfiot aristocrat turned socialist, writing in the threshold of the modern era as the Ionian Islands emerged from centuries of Venetian and British rule, dramatized the harsh lvies, dalliances and hnour killings of the local peasantry and the decline of their Italianized overlords in fiction of great visceral power and compassion. His most personal workd, Slaves in their chains, is ragarded as the first major urban social novel in demotic Greek, and chronicles a noble family's descent into debt, dishonour, suicide and madness on the eve of the First World War.

The Life and Death of Hangman Thomas is at once a dark, often hilarious tragic-comedy of lust and alienation in old age and a disturbing portrayal of rural squalor, incest, disease and superstition. The plot revolves round a priapic irascible old peasant and his infatuation with his neighbour's wife, a formidavle village femme fatale who, in league with her avaricious brother-in-law, sets out to fleece him. But when the honey trap is sprung and the promised sexual perks are not forthcoming, he resolves to seek revenge. The grotesque Expressionist end is bleak and morally ambiguous, but, like much Greek tragedy or the Book of Job or Shakespeare's King Lear, it leaves one pondering the archetypal status of events and the ultimate existential conundrums of injustice, fate and the power of the irrational.