A fifty-year-old man, a former revolutionary and now a successful ministerial advisor, finds himself in the grip of an existential crisis. His neglected Italian wife. His statuesque mistress. His alienated teenage son. The game of disillusionments. The erotic bullfights. The buried expectations and why a poem becomes a wager of life.
A perceptive novel about a society heading toward inevitable collapse.
The hero, trying to master his political ideals, his daily life, his sexual urges, and ultimately words themselves, comes ever closer to the truth... Yet life keeps contradicting it. Ersi Sotiropoulou knows the scene firsthand: if truth is an interpretation of reality, we approach it through successive disillusionments. - Mikela Chartoulari
With inventive prose, tragic yet without neglecting the comic and grotesque side of things, Taming the Beast analyzes the behavior of an elite while simultaneously exploring deeper moral questions. It is read in one breath. - France Culture
The author does not judge her characters: neither Aris, the sidelined politician and poet struggling with words; nor Carla, the perfectionist wife; nor the "Cannibal," the somewhat lost son who finds refuge with his grandmother, an admirer of the TV series Rebel Youth; nor Spitha, the rebellious friend of "Cannibal" who always wears a red cap. She lets them confront their hidden stories, anxieties, and anger, while unraveling the thread of their lives, which feels doomed to break. - Le Nouvel Observateur
