“Glasgow” is a poetic composition or perhaps a poetic novel, since in its 56 pages, prose blends seamlessly with poetry and correspondence to create a literary edifice centred around plurality.
Glasgow is also a single narrative composition. A narrative composition is essentially storytelling. A gradually unfolding scenery of characters and, more importantly, action. Movement extends the story temporally and spatially, making Glasgow fuller and more satisfying to read.
The book begins with a letter by a Woman in Glasgow. The letter finds a response in Greece. And then a wandering journey starts, but not to Glasgow, as one would expect. The journey starts in Larissa and we head north, through the Balkans and on to northcentral Europe. This wandering is not only external and linear, like the tracks of a train on a map, but also an inner journey of the mind. Emotional stimuli fused with dreams, delusions and real experience.
“Glasgow” is an adventure, like the one started in “A Season in Hell” by Rimbaud. We come upon an authentic politeness and an almost lordly nonconformism, as paradoxical as that sounds, in every facet of life. At times it sounds like a manifest. And it is indeed a manifest on love and the revolution life, every day, without compromise and concessions. On these terms, a cancelled trip to Glasgow and to any Glasgow where what we already know is waiting for us, in reality opens up new roads of freedom.