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Search - The Orchards Of Ithaca

The Orchards Of Ithaca
Author: Harry Mark Petrakis

The Orchards of Ithaca, the tenth novel from celebrated Chicago storyteller Harry Mark Petrakis, serves as a vivid allegory of our passage from one epoch to the next as experienced through the microcosm of one Greek Town family’s odyssey into the new millennium. Tempering his trademark naturalism with keen wit, charm, and revelation, Petrak... more »is personalizes humankind’s epic struggle between the unresolved shortcomings of our shared past and the untapped potential of our conjunct future from the street-level vantage point of Orestes Panos, a prosperous restaurateur on the eve of his fiftieth year. Friend and host to Chicago’s pantheon of elite politicos, athletes, journalists, and entertainers, from Ditka to Daley, Jordan to Kup, Orestes is a prominent member of his Halsted Street neighborhood. Unbeknownst to his peers, he privately wars with the consequences of a near-fatal childhood illness and the insecurities foisted upon him by Moustakas, his brutish father who overshadows him even in death. For twenty-three years, Orestes has enjoyed solemn comfort and security in his marriage to the loving Dessie, but all the while she has kept a stark secret of her own. Oblivious to the unvoiced psychological burdens of their parents are the Panos children: Paulie, the young son forced into a hasty wedlock when he impregnated the daughter of an Italian florist and mafioso, and Marika, their trendy teenaged daughter who seeks salvation in designer fashions. Simultaneously amid and aloof from the family, as though their dysfunction made manifest, resides Stavroula, Orestes’s harpy of a mother-in-law and an avid Tom Selleck devotee who harbors open resentment that her son-in-law lacks the machismo of her screen idol. Forming the chorus outside the travail of the Panos family are Cleon, Orestes’s entrepreneurial partner in the Olympia Restaurant; Dr. Savas, a physician of both body and soul; Karvelas, the artisan of undertakers; Banopoulos, the acerbic newsman; Professor Platon, the group’s scholar-in-residence; and master chef Kyriakos, who scorns his patrons as unworthy of his creative cuisine. As Y2K, Oval Office infidelity, the casualties of Columbine, and millennium fever loom over them, this Greek American community is not without its own disruptions. When their spiritual mentor, Fr. Anton, is accused of child molestation by Sam Tzangaris, Satan’s emissary on the church Board of Trustees, Orestes is put in the unenviable position of the young priest’s orator and advocate in the court of public opinion. Were this alone not enough of a hero’s trial, he also must contend with the golden-haired temptress, Sarah Fleming, a young beauty existing between her reality as an artist and her fantasy as the reincarnated lover to Dante, with the poet’s role reserved for Orestes. But these crises of faith and fealty pale to the contest of character arising when family tragedy sparks confession in the Panos household, forcing Orestes and Dessie to reveal long-concealed truths that test their sacred union. With their routine reality torn asunder, the Panoses confront two possible futures on New Year’s Eve, the same possibilities posed to a conflicted globe: to enter this fresh millennium still imprisoned by the terrors and obsessions of individual pasts or to find the heretofore unknown will, wisdom, and compassion to move forward as more liberated and united human beings.

ISBN-13: 9780809325788
ISBN-10: 0809325780
Publication Date: 8/13/2004
Pages: 270
Rating:

0 stars, based on 0 rating

Publisher: Southern Illinois University Press
Book Type: Hardcover
Members Wishing: 1
Reviews: Amazon | Write a Review

Genres:

Literature & Fiction >> Humor & Satire
Literature & Fiction >> General >> Contemporary

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