Junkermann: Junkermann’s Swan Song

M.KARAGATSIS
Translated by Patricia Felisa Barbeito

Junkermann’s Swan Song returns to Vasily Karlovich Junkermann at the end of his life. The swaggering adventurer of the first volume—Cossack guard, refugee, social climber, and self-styled conqueror of interwar Athens—now confronts the reckoning of age, disillusionment, and decline. Where Junkermann traced a frenetic rise shaped by appetite, ambition, and desire, this second volume turns inward, offering a darker, more introspective meditation on memory, loss, and mortality.

Older and increasingly isolated, Junkermann looks back on a life that now appears at once grand and grotesque, a farce animated by illusions of success, love, and masculine honour that have long since
curdled into bitterness and emptiness. As past passions and betrayals resurface, the novel assumes a distinctly Faustian cast, probing the psychic costs of a life spent in pursuit of power and pleasure.

Tragic, surreal, and often darkly comic, Junkermann’s Swan Song weaves together psychological depth and Freudian undertones with Karagatsis’s sharp social insight and mordant humour. In its unflinching portrait of a man undone by the very myth that once sustained him, the novel becomes a haunting reflection on the chimera of success and the devastation that follows when its promise proves hollow.

Like The Great Gatsby and Tender is the Night, Junkermann should be read as one of the emblematic novels of the interbellum period, not just on a Greek, but on a global scale.
― Gunnar De Boel
Journal of Modern
Greek Studies
May 2009

Junkermann is a thoroughly engrossing read… As a Greek offshoot of the western tradition of the novel, it deserves closer examination, celebration and, quite possibly a Hollywood movie, all of its own.
― Dean Kalimniou
NEOS KOSMOS