Description

Yorgos Ducarelis, professor of archaeology at the University of Athens, returned to the Lesser Cyclades twenty years after the archaeological expedition that made him a celebrity and changed his personal and professional life forever.

He has another expedition ahead of him, this time to the depths of his own soul. Wandering once again through the places he once lived, among the memories and invisible threads that connect him to three women from the distant past, the recent past and the present, under the bright sun of Aegean, between the rocks, the barren land, the sea and the vast blue of the sky, Ducarellis will try to sort out his life and recall what happened that crucial summer.

A novel on the border between past and present about time, its ruthlessness, memory, love and infidelity.

What actually torments his mind? There is no script, his life is not a TV series. In real life, an invisible hand writes the script as events unfold. He always thought of himself as foresighted, always wanted to hold his destiny in his own hands, to determine his own fate. Now, however, this is no longer in his power. All he wants is to order his thoughts, to give shape and form to his life, which lately has been slipping through his fingers like sand in an hourglass. He, who has been trying, ever since he can remember, to uncover the secrets of the past and reconstruct the ways of prehistoric men, is now utterly unable to control his own life, to unravel the mysteries of his soul. Every time he tries to unravel them, he gets lost in the black labyrinth of his mind. Only questions hover there, no answers like the ones he gives with his excavations and his books. He wishes he could find some peace, and yes, he does not deny that the fleeting thought has crossed his mind like a glimmer, that he would not have done badly if he happened to leave his bones on this island. Provided, of course, that death occurred accidentally, suddenly, naturally. And who knows, maybe then archaeologists of the future will discover him thousands of years later, buried in the dirt, petrified next to some prehistoric grave, and date his remains. He knows that the starting point to calculate his age will be the five thousand seven hundred and thirty years it takes for the neutrons in the nucleus of radioactive carbon 14 to half-decay. And that is when its life will take on other dimensions. It seems absurd to him now even to imagine the decades of his life against the background of those five thousand seven hundred and thirty years. Still less against the five billion years of the earth, or the 13.7 of the universe, against eternity.