Balkan Library

"Dangerous Cooking", Andreas Staikos

© Andreas Staikos,1998
Translator: Zdravka Mihailova
First edititon 2005. Greek. 108 pages. Price 2,5 euro.

If gourmet literature did not constitute an official category of Greek prose fiction until recently, a series a novels nevertheless obliges us to recognize that such a category may lay claim to its own autonomy as a type of literature. This began with the novel Yantes by Amanda Nichalopoulou, Aris Sfakianakis in Our Writers’ Favorite Foods, the narratives contained in Cumin and Cinnamon – a palimpsest of ten short stories, all of which have food as their main motif, signed by Y. Yatromanolakis, Vasilis Gouroyannis, Alexandros Isaris, Tasoso Kaloutas, Angela Kastrinaki, Amanda Michalopoulou, Michel Fais, Faedon Tamvakakis, etc.

Dangerous Cooking, the first novel and second prose writing of the well-renowned playwright A. Staikos(1944-), refers the reader ostentatiously to the epistolary novel Les Liaisons Dangereuses of Choderlos De Laclos, which Staikos has transferred into Greek. The playful change in the title where cooking replaces “liaisons” is not a random choice: cooking is an art, forming part of the cycle of earthly pleasures on the one hand, and cooking in its metaphorical sense of intrigue on the other hand, condense the philosophy of the text. Cooking thus functions as the touchstone for erotic devotion and as a measure of erotic desire, and the novel may be equally read as a light, erotic story and as an example of contemporary free writing (“free” in the sense of the French word libertinage) where the theatricality stands for a world view.

The novel Dangerous Cooking, exemplary for the trend of the modern Greek gourmet literature, is translated in more than 18 languages. Its Bulgarian edition will contribute to present the literary examination of this interesting manifestation of life in modern Greek society.