Emmanuel Retsinas (call him Louis) flows like a river in full flood through <>, the brilliant first novel by Greek playwright Kostas Mourselas. Louis is the "almost man", once and forever lumpen and anarchocommunist, sometime circus daredevil, part-time yacht captain, full-time subverter of propriety, morals, order. Destroyer, builder, provocateur, catalyst extraordinaire. Spanning four decades of contemporary Greek life as seen from the bottom of the barrel, the novel is an inspired mixture of social satire and political history, a compendium of the bizarre, the erotic, the banal and the unbearable-people by a crazed yet touching cross-section of social rejects and climbers, betrayed leftists and police informers, of con-men become businessmen, of whores and bouzouki singers, pimps and greengrocers.In scene embedded within scene <> spins a tale of social and personal cowardice and treachery against a distant backdrop of courage betrayed at the cost of death. This is the story of a generation that "knocked on the wrong doors, slept in the wrong beds, loved the wrong people, made the wrong choices. " <> is a hall of ever-receding, endlessly distorting mirrors, a warped (as only art can warp) reflection of the chamber of horrors- the whorehouse- called life. Heraclitan in its flux, self- contained, inconclusive, incisive, <> is like life: painful; infinitely various and upredictable.