'The collection of stories is the imaginative recreation of the experience of living on Glebe Point Road, in Sydney for over thirty years. Through the encounters of the unidentified writer with actual individuals, the author evokes unsuspected episodes and quirky moments from the lives of countless ordinary or sometimes extraordinary people.
'The book is structured around such fleeting snapshots depicting moments of compassion, despair, love, as well as death, evil and despair.
'The narrative is in both prose and poetry as ‘the two zones of being’ are fused: the everyday and the common leads to the transcendental and the outlandish.
'The book transforms Glebe Point Road into a universal landscape of fall, transfiguration and redemption, in which a respectable professor from Sydney University, a larrikin book-seller, a Belgian coffee maker, a British back-packer, a Greek expatriate, an eminent religious leader, a Vietnam veteran, a suicidal poet, a religious trans-sexual, an Iraqi-Jewish doctor, a failed politician, a child of the stolen generation, a visionary museum-curator, a window-cleaner, a renegade scholar, a self-indulgent young poet, a ferocious old Nazi, a lonely British woman, an unrepented Catholic mother, a New Zealand bushido fighter, an artist, his wife, a transgender assassin, a dying poet, a Chinese dry-cleaner and many more wrestle simultaneously with their angels and demons and are all defeated. Out of the actualities of their life, the writer wants to extract the myths that all these characters unconsciously embody. The Road itself takes active part in their existence. Finally, they all ‘get the blues’ a cosmic melancholy which the poems in the book, a hybrid genre of psalms and odes, desire to articulate.'
Source: Publisher's blurb.
'Vrasidas Karalis’ The Glebe Point Road Blues (Brandl & Schlesinger, 2020) is a singularly haunting reading experience. A simple definition of its form might be elegy: its primary function is to pay respect to the memory of people who, though they were inhabitants of Glebe Point Road, remained profoundly homeless until death. Through its liturgical incantations, the book resurrects and redeems the deceased by providing a celestial resting place. It also reasserts these metaphysical nomads into the cultural histories from which they were tragically sundered in life.' (Introduction)
'Vrasidas Karalis’ The Glebe Point Road Blues (Brandl & Schlesinger, 2020) is a singularly haunting reading experience. A simple definition of its form might be elegy: its primary function is to pay respect to the memory of people who, though they were inhabitants of Glebe Point Road, remained profoundly homeless until death. Through its liturgical incantations, the book resurrects and redeems the deceased by providing a celestial resting place. It also reasserts these metaphysical nomads into the cultural histories from which they were tragically sundered in life.' (Introduction)
