Sunday 8 October 2017

Review by Alexandros Plasatis of “The Quest” by Yannis Kyrlis


Yannis Kyrlis is a man who knows how to handle dreams and paint daylight with marvellous splashes of darkness. This is a collection with twelve short stories of sweet confusion, translated from Greek into English, and published by Austin MacAuley in 2017.

In The Threat, Kyrlis builds his plot slowly and steadily and holds you there in this eerie story with clear-headed, fresh prose. The Quest is a touching, almost romantic story, and readers might find themselves asking if they have lost their hearts, if a lost heart can still be beautiful. It is an inspiring tale of a man who tries to find himself, helped by a stranger who knows how to recognise and paint the beauty of lost hearts, the Illustrator. Like the Judge in the story, sensitive readers will judge themselves and their actions.  

Some stories are very short, some are longer, like Confession in a Café, my favourite story in this beautiful collection. Here we witness again the author’s natural gift to bring in dreams halfway through a piece that is pure realism and take us once more into his strange world of symbols.

If you are looking for explanations, look elsewhere, The Quest by Yiannis Kyrlis will give you none of that.

About the reviewer
Alexandros Plasatis is an immigrant ethnographer who writes fiction in English, his second language. His work has appeared in UK and American anthologies and magazines. He is a volunteer at Leicester City of Sanctuary, where he helps find and develop new creative talent within the refugee and asylum seeker community. He lives in Leicester. 

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