Campesinos y señores

The works that elevated Theodor Kallifatides as one of the great European writers of the second half of the 20th century were his three novels Peasants and Gentlemen (1973), The Plow and the Sword (1975) and A Cruel Peace (1977). They are translated for the first time into Spanish. With them, Kallifatides portrayed his childhood and adolescence and at the same time the most tragic period in the contemporary history of Greece, which runs from the Nazis invaded country in 1941 to the end of the Greek civil war in 1949, and the misery of the postwar period in a devastated country. In Peasants and Gentlemen, everything begins in a small town in the south of the Peloponnese, Yalós. Mussolini's troops arrive first, soon replaced by the much more brutal and cruel Nazi army. But the invasions barely appear like a distant storm. The novelist's gaze, tender, compassionate and full of humor, focuses on the inhabitants of Yalós, who try to survive, between fear, hunger, acceptance and resistance: the heterodox priest, the collaborationist mayor, the baker, the peasants, the socialist teacher, the village fool and above all the mothers and grandmothers, true protagonists of Kallifatides' books.