Book Club: The Sleepwalker (1985) by Margarita Karapanou

At the opening of Margarita Karapanou’s stunning second novel, in disgust at mankind God vomits a new Messiah onto the earth. Or rather, onto a Greek island. Populated by villagers, ex-pats, artists, writers, this island is a Tower of Babel, a place where languages and individuals have been assembled, as though in wait for something as horrific and comic as this second coming.

The Sleepwalker moves deftly and dizzyingly between genres—satire, murder mystery, magical realism, its own brand of Theater of the Absurd—following Manolis, the new Messiah, as he moves through this place and its characters like a sleepwalker, unaware to the very end of his divine nature.

In The Sleepwalker Karapanou has created an unforgettable depiction of a dissolute world, desperately comic and full of compassion, a world in which nightmare and miracle both uneasily reside.