2023 novel by Dimitris Lyacos
Until the Victim Becomes our Own is a composite novel by Greek author Dimitris Lyacos. Conceived as the book "zeroth" of the Poena Damni trilogy the book explores bloodshed as the building-block in the formation of society and the eventual place of the individual in a world "permeated by institutionalized violence."
Themes.
Until the Victim Becomes Our Own explores the evolution of violence in a sequence of chapters each headed by a letter of the classical Latin alphabet. The first chapters deal with violence in the animal world and are followed by an episode reminiscent of Cain's murder of Abel from the book of Genesis.
Further episodes depict violence in its socially more advanced, institutionalized forms, presenting in two consecutive sections the practice of incarceration from two different vantage points. According to an interview with Lyacos in World Literature Today chapter "L focuses on an inmate as part of the prison's general population, and M is a take on SHU, the segregation housing unit—solitary confinement as a strategy intended to help the inmate turn an inward eye on himself, contemplate his acts, and self-correct. This is an almost religious view of incarceration, one akin to the model of a monk in its cell, left alone with himself and God and surrounded by a monastery, which, incidentally, sociologist Erving Goffman groups in the category of total institutions".
Publication History.
Chapter O in Albanian translation appeared in Revista Letrare in 2022. Chapter G in English translation appeared in Mayday Magazine in March 2023, chapter D in Image in March 2024, chapter V in the Chicago Review in August 2024 and chapter L in River Styx in December 2024. Chapters A, B and C translated in Hebrew by Ioram Melcer appeared in Alaxon magazine in September 2024.
References.
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