Pubished: March 2008
In
The Eye of Justice, a biology teacher initiates her students into her subject just as a dime store clerk would with a young buyer of porn magazines: through repetition. The power of the flesh is irrepressible in every story of this volume; so is the will to survive and overpower the Other. But so is the power of justice—a justice that isn’t rooted in some divine or human law and is irrepressible as it takes the form of a wild nemesis that seals the uneven course of human events.
Thanks to the careful sketching of his characters and the studied escalation of his plot, Yannis Chairetakis’s short stories as are action-packed as novels yet they narrate events in the lives of the people next door. What distinguishes Chairetakis’s work is his ability to give his account of even the most trivial incident the magnitude of an epic event. He does this by using the simple ploy of the classic detective story were everyone, even suspects, fail to notice what the reader notices—an insignificant detail, the slimmest edge of the wedge through which the eye of justice peers.
Read an interview with the author at the
Readers Guide.