FROSYNI

FROSYNI

THE Wisdom by French author Jean Bloch-Michel is a simple story set on an unnamed Greek island in the 1960s. This low-key narrative has as its central theme the father-daughter conflict, due to the daughter's scandalous desire to define her own life. In essence, however, Wisdom it captures the impact of social change on the microcosm of ordinary people: it poses, in a direct and almost Doric style, the question of the will. The responsibility of our choices, claiming the life we want, respecting the other's attitude is the real theme of the narrative. The reader slowly discovers something recognizably his own, as the path to adulthood inevitably involves breaking with the previous generation. THE Wisdom adopts the pure language of the classical French realist tradition. Realism is also the axis of the first series with which the newly founded publishing house OKTANA of Thessaloniki chose to make its debut, which chooses to adapt each edition to the character of the text, taking care to balance functionality with aesthetics.

Jean Bloch-Michel (Paris, 1912-1987), journalist, writer, literary critic and translator, member of the French resistance, was a close friend and collaborator of Albert Camus, originally in the illegal newspaper Combat, the political organ of the resistance movement, led by Jean Bloch-Michel. He prefaced many of Camus' early editions, best known for his lengthy introductory note to Thoughts on the death penalty which he co-signed with Arthur Koestler in 1957. Judging by the love and enthusiasm with which he approaches Greece, we could well imagine him as a fellow traveler of Camus on his tours of the Greek islands in 1958.