Thanasēs Triaridēs

This is a book most unusual and one that badly needs to see a translation into English. That said, the book, whose title can be trasncribed as "the lemons of honey", takes the reader into waters, that many will not have the stomach, the intellectual openess or plain patience to dare tread. This is a book about the sacredness of human sexuality, a rewriting of scripture into a new Covenant (whose multiple renditions seem to eerily echo the versatility and contradictions of Biblical tales) and a fully-fledged attack on human hypocrisy, intolerance, bigotism, religious fanaticism, war, genocide, and the bias against physical love that has been a cornerstone of this human civilization for a very long time. That is not to say that 'The Lemons of Honey' do not flirt with violence. They do so constantly, in a way that can be inspiring, baffling, horrifying: by using the power of myths in the context of Human history and (mostly Western) art, precisely and in a subtler mockery of the way "sacred" books will use their presence as the "canon of the conscience" to pass horrific messages, clad in sugared truths. At the heart of THIS book, there is nothing less than a revolt against history's constant hiding of truths, via countless possible rereadings of our humanity's potential - for love and self-destruction. But this book does so in a tongue-in-cheek manner, one that questions its very foundations (and, in doing so, reinforcing them.) This book begins with the message "do not believe me" and ends with the book's voice inciting people to be sexually aroused - even if they do not believe the voice, for that is the point the book makes, the sacredness of our sexuality; THAT is what it asks of us, NOT the adherence to this or that truth. Myths give the author the capacity to weave everything - from Oedipous of the ancient tragedy to "the man in rags" that here is a hermaphrodite version of Jesus Christ - a version dedicated to the union of human beings, not obedience to an unscrupulous Father. God in the "Lemons of Honey" is many things, and it is those things that our History has made him. Not an omniwise being, not an ideal, but a projection of our very human capacity to oppress and to be unjust to one another, a historical God with "pagan" (and not only) myths used to draw him vividly, horribly, drawing on one and unavoidable truth: that the moment Man deems abstract ideas and faiths as superior to any one human life, that is a recipe for destruction and evil. That said, this book courts a lot with those who would break the cycle - but require an equally powerful incentive, such as the lemons of honey or the feeding heart of a metaphysical figure, for, without it, they will return to their old habits, those of enslavement, loyalty to the powers that be, and the hypocritical damnation of those that hitherto shared their very passions. I could go on for a very long time, but I shall conclude by saying that this book gets those precious 5 stars from me not just because of its fabulous storytelling, nor just because of its bold rendition of so much history and myth and art into a firmament of starkness, but, above everything else, becase it is a book about HUMANITY. And it tells us to question so many things that we seem to take for granted; and to remember that the cause for so much of our devastation and bloodspilling is not some demon, but our very human tendency to stick to the things we are taught to believe in, and never to question the ways in which we are taught to think, to interpret, to see the world - even as we forget that some things, such as our universal desire for one another, are what makes us One. Both in our most abysmal moments and our most luminous of raptures.… (lisätietoja)