: Christina Moutsou
: Layers
: AKAKIA Publications
: 9781912322992
: 1
: CHF 8.80
:
: Erzählende Literatur
: English
: 484
: DRM
: PC/MAC/eReader/Tablet
: ePUB

Across the years, four people, caught up in the maelstrom of a family secret, attempt to come to terms with its aftermath. From London to Athens, from Thessaloniki to Paris, their various trajectories form an intricate story like the many layers of a sumptuous cake. An inner journey and at the same time a kaleidoscope of perspectives, which has at its heart the never-ending search for redemption.


An enthralling portrayal of complex emotional turmoil. I marvelled at the bold handling of time. Not only does it make the reader poignantly feel they are transcending time and space, it makes a kind of spellbinding music out of the juxtapositions and leitmotifs lyrically woven throughout the narrative.
Dr Graham Frankland,academic translator and editor, author ofFreud's Literary Culture


Christina Moutsou is a Cambridge graduate in social anthropology and a psychoanalytic psychotherapist working in private practice in London. Her collection of short stories has been published by Routledge in September 2018 with the titleFictional clinical narratives in relational psychoanalysis: Stories from adolescence to the consulting room.


Layers has been translated into Greek and published by Archetypo in March 2018 with the title,Black Cake.




3
Sweet adolescence

Thessaloniki, 25 January 1986

My dearest diary Jardin,

Last night I had the strangest of dreams:

I was looking at my face in the big silver mirror by the entrance hall and through the mirror I could see that I had a hole in my head, and through the hole I entered a space with two interconnecting rooms. I walked through the first empty room into the second room, where two middle-aged men in religious gowns were sitting down on what appeared like thrones, one of them holding a sceptre. ‘Tell me the truth’, I said. ‘I want to know the truth.’

The man with the sceptre stared at me with magnetic, dark eyes. He shook his head. ‘No.’

***

‘Your dream is likeAlice in Wonderland’, Lea said while they were walking along the seafront, the city’s humid wind piercing through their coats. They were downtown like every Saturday morning. The familiar scent of Thermaikos’s city waters, a mix of seaweed, salt and dirt rose to Eleni’s nose giving her pleasure. She loved the city and the sea. As she walked with Lea along the seafront heading from the old harbour to the White Tower, the cars and banter from the cafés facing the sea buzzed on their left-hand side. Lea liked to talk in riddles, and sometimes, Eleni thought this was the only reason she was quickly becoming her best friend, the only worthy point of reference in the overall distasteful all-girls private her parents had planted her in without so much as her consent.

‘Alice in Wonderland?’ Eleni said, puzzled.

‘You know, like another reality you are just about to discover.’

The magic of their stroll downtown evaporated quickly for Eleni, when they stopped at the ice-skating café at Lea’s insistence. Why did Lea love so much to mingle with the posh lot from their school, Eleni wondered. Teenage girls dressed in stupidly expensive all-American brands, flirting desperately with the boys from the 11th High School who frequented the café, perfecting the act of spending their wealthy parents’ money. The only bit that was worth it there was the ice-skating itself; Eleni had said to Lea as much.

‘I have to go’, she mumbled less than an hour after their arrival at the café. ‘You know what my parents are like, we have to sit down to lunch together on weekends and all that stuff.’ The dream had played on her mind all morning.

***

Lunch was boring again.

‘This is the most delectable cut of beef you ever had, Eleni. My friend Kostas, the butcher, reserved it especially for me.’

‘I just want pasta with cheese.’

‘But you have to try the beef.’

They all went on eating quietly, as though there was nothing more important in the world than the steaming pile on their plates.

When Eleni and Lea had walked along the seafront earlier on that morning, Eleni could already anticipate her return home, where she was expected for lunch in a couple of hours. She would start heading uphill, away from the sea, the washing l