'Palimpsest is about high ideals and low obsessions, truth and identity, migration, nationality and race; what we believe and what happens when belief degenerates into fanaticism.
When thirty-year-old philosopher Kally Palamas must unexpectedly leave Coober Pedy to attend her estranged father's funeral in Zelopolis, in Greece, all she really wants is to escape her stagnant life.
In Zelopolis, Kally meets Ari Paleologos, who writes an account of her father Akindyynos's life and work, and Ari's father, Thomas, who acts as her sometime guide and leads her through the village's history, revealing some things and keeping other things hidden.
Thus begins the unravelling of the life and death of Akindynos, of the modern village and the ancient city, of the modern Greek's obsession with the past, and of Kally's own confrontation with her daughter's death and of her inability to philosophize.' (Publisher's blurb)
Epigraph:
All history was a palimpsest, scraped clean and reinscribed exactly as often as was necessary. - George Orwell
Written on the body is a secret code only visible in certain lights: the accumulations of a lifetime gather there. In places the palimpsest is so heavily worked that the letters feel like Braille. - Janette Winterson
Language is an archaeological vehicle...the language we speak is a whole palimpsest of human effort and history. - Russell Hoban
The Archimedes Palimpsest...is...a rather small and unprepossessing manuscript. It has been damaged by mould, fire, and abuse. - The Walters Art Gallery
The face of Greece is a palimpsest of twelve major overlapping scripts: the modern, 1921, the Turkish Occupation, the Frankish occupation, Byzantium, the Roman Empire, the Hellenistic age, the Classical age, the Doric middle ages, the Mycenaean, the Aegean and the Stone Age. - Nikos Kazantzakis
Epigraph:
...the monster, fanaticism, still exists,
and whoever seeks after the truth
will run the risk of being persecuted.
-Voltaire
