In 1948, during the Communist insurrection in Greece, a U.S. journalist is found murdered. To keep foreign aid flowing, the right-wing government prosecutes an innocent Greek. In 2011, at the height of the economic and political crisis brought on by austerity measures, a highly intelligent, disaffected student attempts to make sense of the incident. Inspired by the still-unsolved murder of American journalist George Polk and the recent financial crisis, The Scapegoat explores these two tense and troubled times.
In this first English translation of her work, Sophia Nikolaidou creates a compelling cast of characters. Manolis Gris is the eponymous scapegoat, who scrambled to provide for his siblings and mother after the death of his father and is railroaded for the alleged benefit of Greek society, and Minas Georgiou is the student frustrated with the high-stakes Panhellenic exams that will determine his future in a time when there may not be a future worth striving for. Nikolaidou's strong secondary characters include Soukiouroglou, an instructor who failed to obtain a university appointment and now serves as an enlightened despot in the classroom; Evthalia, a retired philologist who carries with her the weight of Ancient Greece; and the chilling Tzitzilis, the head of the Salonica Security Police. Tzitzilis could have haunted a Graham Greene thriller; he is willing to do the dirty work he deems necessary to preserve his community, including torturing the families of suspected communists.
The varied perspectives of these characters create a snapshot of lives in turmoil in a place of deep history and even deeper conflict. --Evan M. Anderson, collection development librarian, kirkendall Public Library, Ankeny, Iowa