Overview

Parlapan was a war hero, a captain of the Greek Royal Navy, and a childhood idol in the eyes of the young Doxiadis. Years after his death, Doxiadis sets out to tell his remarkable story--and learns nearly everything he knew of Parlapan was a lie. Apostolos Doxiadis was a toddler when he first met Parlapan, his father's closest friend. Parlapan's uncommon height (at six foot three, he was practically a giant in 1950s Athens), his uniform of a captain of the Greek Royal Navy, and the constant references to him as war hero made him all but superhuman in the eyes of the young Doxiadis. Parlapan's story came to him in different versions: As a child, he heard that Parlapan was a great hero. But by the time Doxiadis reached mid-adolescence, he knew that the hero had been destroyed by calumny, accused of high treason in the midst of a bloody civil war, sentenced to death, and saved at the last moment from the firing squad through the love of a woman. Parlapan died childless at fifty-six. Doxiadis was sixteen at the time and felt he should tell Parlapan's stroy. But as he started to write, in midlife, he was informed by official history that what he knew about Parlapan was a fantasy. Or worse: a pack of lies. Refusing to accept this, he spent fifteen years trying to dig out, assemble, and understand the truth, a process in which he had to un-learn and re-learn everything he knew about stories--and about life itself.

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9781912559169

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Apostolos Doxiadis is a novelist and essayist. Among his books are the international bestsellers Uncle Petros and Goldbach's Conjecture and Logicomix.

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