The protagonist in each of these stories is a solitary individual, alienated from society, haunted by memories, fascinated by the disgusting, obsessed with the relationship between love and death, and fetishistically attached to certain objects that bear the traces of traumatic experiences. Ioannou brilliantly highlights the discrepancy between intimate acts of sex and violence, and the way people pretend in public that life can be lived without physicality. In <>-his last book of stories before his untimely death in 1985- Ioannou departs from the conversational tone of his earlier work and develops an intricate style whose wanderings evoke the associative meanderings of the memory.