Z213: Exit

Z213: EXIT

Z213: EXIT, Front Cover of Second Edition
Author	Dimitris Lyacos
Original title	Ζ213: ΕΞΟΔΟΣ
Translator	Shorsha Sullivan
Cover artist	Dominik Ziller
Country	Greece
Language	Greek
Series	Poena Damni
Genre	World Literature, Postmodernism
Publisher	Shoestring Press
Publication date	2009 (First Edition, Greek)
Published in English	2010 (First Edition)
Pages	101 (First Edition)/152 (Second Edition)
ISBN
Followed by	With the People from the Bridge

Z213: Exit is the first installment of the Poena Damni trilogy by Greek author Dimitris Lyacos. Despite being first in narrative order, the book was the third to be published of the three. The work develops as a sequence of fragmented diary entries recording the solitary experiences of an unnamed, Ulysses-like persona in the course of a train voyage gradually transformed into an inner exploration of the boundaries between self and reality. The voyage is also akin to the experience of a religious quest with a variety of biblical references, mostly from the Old Testament, being embedded into the text which is often fractured and foregoing punctuation. Most critics place Z213: Exit in a postmodern context exploring relationships with such writers as Samuel Beckett and Cormac McCarthy while others underline its modernist affinities and the work's firm foundation on classical and religious texts.

Z213: Exit obliterates genre boundaries and is simultaneously a novella, a poem and a journal. In contradistinction to “factual report” works such as If this is a man by Primo Levi, the work adopts a mode of oneiric realism whereby horror is forced beneath the surface of consciousness only to emerge again in new and increasingly nightmarish forms. Oblique references to tragedies of recent human history are apparent, although, ample Biblical and mythical motives suggest a far broader project. The book can be read as the first volume of a postmodern epic.

The work recounts, in what reads like a personal journal, in verse form as well as in postmodern poetic prose, the wanderings of a man who escapes from a guarded building, in a nightmarish version of a post-Armageddon ambient. In the opening sections of the book, the narrator/protagonist flees from what seems like an imprisonment in a building consisting of wards and personnel and from where people are being inexplicably taken away to be thrown into pits. The fugitive leaves the "camp" to get to the nearby train station and starts a journey he records in a "found" bible-like booklet which he turns into his diary. As the journey continues a growing sense of paranoia ensues and the idea of being pursued becomes an increasingly central preoccupation. There are no pursuers to be identified, however, in the course of the journey and the supposed hunt remains a mystery until the end. The environment seems to allude to a decadent futuristic state of a totalitarian kind. The journey is mapped in an indeterminate way, though oblique references creating a feeling of a time/space vacuum. The narrator seems to be moving ahead while at the same time being engulfed in his own nightmarish fantasies.Z213: Exit ends with a description of a sacrifice where the protagonist and a "hungry band feasting" roast a lamb on a spit, cutting and skinning its still bleating body and removing its entrails as if observing a sacred rite. The mood is enhanced by the overriding waste-land setting, which could be (it is never explicit) the result of a war that has left the landscape in ruins. The general impression is reminiscent of a spiritual quest or an eschatological experience.