I Shall Sign as Loui Book

It is Christmas Eve, 1888, and the poet-revolutionary Andreas Rigopoulos (1821-89) is writing to a friend of years past, with whom he is still in love. He is recording the details of his soul and sadness, a life filled with love and revolution, politics and poetry. Rigopoulos confesses he does not know what he wishes his story to accomplish and ultimately concludes, with the simplicity of a tortured poet, "I want to write to you about my life." He will call her Louisa, and he shall sign as Loui.

In her first novel published in America, the renowned Greek writer Rhea Galanaki has given us a powerful, passionate story of the life of a real person, told through fictional letters. Rigopoulos (Loui) has grown up in western Greece, was educated in Italy, and dies at sea. In between, he befriends Victor Hugo and Edgar Quinet, meets Karl Marx, and participates in the Italian underground and student uprisings in support of Garibaldi. Loui's letters to Louisa cover a life spent traveling across Europe, from Patras and the Ionian Islands to Italy and Paris, taking readers through the revolutionary movements of midnineteenth-century Europe and America. At the end of the novel—or is it his life?—he writes these words:

The time consents to my ignorance once more?whether you were only a face, or in one face I summed up all the others; whether you came as a vision or I embraced you as a woman; whether you are now dead or still unborn.

I was in love with the siren of a certain revolution. She will now blow out her first one hundred candles in the sea, and she is waiting for me at the celebration so we can embrace each other in love.

So long, Louisa, whoever you may be.

With lyrical, haunting prose, Galanaki blends fiction and reality, weaving a textured story that is as rich in emotion as it is in history.