THE PAIN PAIN

Those who came of age in the first years after the dictatorship recall the atmosphere of the time as fluid, stimulating and ambivalent. A bittersweet confusion, sometimes amusing and sometimes irritating. The students of those days - the author among them - had spent half their lives until then under a regime of political fasting. Hence, they fell headlong into politics and associated it with every possible and unlikely aspect of their daily life. With their sexual gluttony, with their existential insecurity, with the death of any ideological delusion. The generation "born tired" fought one last battle before its total surrender.

The Painkiller records exactly this moment in time. Around a young girl who kills herself because she can't stand the pressure, the web of those who tried to prevent her and those who led her there an hour earlier is woven. Petros Tatsopoulos gives the microphone indiscriminately to the perpetrators and the victims. Disparate characters - gods, freaks, anarchists, thugs - are caught in the same narrative lens, before the segregation we experience today is imposed.

"Petros Tatsopoulos is one of the main and most popular representatives of the '80s. Criticism recognizes as its strengths the inventiveness in fiction, the great narrative flexibility and the caustic humor that permeates its pages"

Demosthenes Kurtovik, Greek post-war writers

"Tatsopoulos belongs to the rare category of gifted prose writers who come to the arena almost ready... In Pausipono he attempts the panoramic illustration of a still fresh era and succeeds in a novel that is read with intense interest."

Spyros Tsaknias, The Word

"Tatsopoulos communicates with his readers with a language devoid of any embellishment, emotionally uncharged, always low-key and realistic and sometimes catalytically ironic. His speech becomes the main conduit for the transmission of corrosive experiences."

G. D. Paganos, Letters and Arts

"The painkiller comes to reveal not only the author's ability to move between the 'Greeks' of linguistic groups, from the freaks of the Exarchia to the god-fearing mothers, but also to transfer them to the text under a single style, his own ».

Anastasia Lambria, Mesimbrini