Like a modern day Edward Casaubon, from Eliot’s Middlemarch, Akindynos returned to his little village of Zelopolis, and became a self-proclaimed philosopher driven to comprehensively record and preach the virtues, ideals and truth of Hellenism.

As the novel’s title unsubtly announces, the novel is structured as a palimpsest with multiple stories providing variations of the main theme. And added into the mix, almost as an afterthought, is the story of Kally Palamas. Unfortunately, she is neither complex nor compelling. Her function is to observe and collate these many strands of storytelling to the reader, and her father is exposed as an obsessed man, impervious to ideas and critical thinking, a dangerous man, whose death is quickly described so that the novel can be concluded.

Palimpsest is proudly postmodern. Extolling and proclaiming its self-conscious intertextuality: from the words of its Prolegomena, to its quotations from Orwell, Voltaire, Wilde and Co, and yes, Plato’s famous parable of the cave makes an appearance, but not because it advances the narrative in any meaningful sense. Philosophical fiction is art that can transform lives. Koromilas is a thoughtful writer, but she must leave the academy behind if she wants to write authentic fiction.