My novel “Ierapetra” comes to life
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My novel Ierapetra, or His Sister’s Keeper is finally set to be published. After numerous attempts to get a publisher or an agent interested, I finally decided to publish it myself. I joined the Alliance of Independent Authors, and through them I found Dartfrog and its Canoe Tree program, which specializes in supporting self-publishing: in getting a book professionally finished and ready to hit the market.
Here is a summary and the blurbs by two highly accomplished authors who have read the work, to appear on the back cover:
Ierapetra, or His Sister’s Keeper, is a man’s attempt to overcome grief and guilt through storytelling. Reiner, now retired in the Berkshires, reminisces about the times he spent with his younger sister, Monika, who succumbed to cancer in her early fifties. His memory centers around traumatic events during a trip he took with her to Crete in the 1960s, which left Monika with emotional scars and Reiner with a perpetual feeling of insufficiency and guilt.
Between glimpses of its ancient cultures, Crete comes to life in its spectacular atmospheric light. Its own brand of Greek island music and the vitality of its people are shaped by European echoes of the Vietnam protests and hippies flooding pristine beaches. The siblings’ ensuing trajectories take them through Europe against the background of Chernobyl, the fall of the Berlin Wall, the completion of the Chunnel and the advent of the Internet. In the final chapters, set in Barcelona after his sister’s demise, the growing tension between the truth and Reiner’s revisionist history leads to a breaking point.
“This is a very interesting and striking novel. The language both in terms of the descriptive passages and the dialogue is evocative and complex. The dynamics between Germany and Greece, between Crete and Manhattan in that wonderful closing and bracing passage, between siblings, and between the contemplative/narrative viewpoint and an individual who might forever be beyond meaning or understanding are well rendered. It is a compelling and at times summer story, and the reader is always worked.”
—Nicholas Birns, author of Theory After Theory and Contemporary Australian Literature
“In this beautifully realized and artfully layered novel Joachim Frank takes us from the isle of Crete, where sun and Eros reign, to the gray rigors of Protestant Germany, to the improbable labyrinths of Gaudi’s Barcelona. Our traveling companion is Reiner, complex, occasionally reprehensible, always engaging. With us also is Reiner’s sister Monika, a winning character possessed of fine artistic intuitions. In another novel (think of Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice) the effect of Mediterranean permissiveness on Germanic discipline can be fatally corrosive, but here the lessoning is softer if still powerful. Monika comes home with a new eye for color and pattern, which she stitches into her quilts. Reiner experiences in the warm moonlit nights of Ierapetra intimations of a world beyond the rational. This will temper forever his passionate inquiries as a scientist. Ierapetra is an incisive study of character as it encounters the cultural and the metaphysical Other.”
– Eugene K. Garber, author of Maison Cristina and the Eroica Trilogy
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