Much-loved academic, polymath and prolific author, Professor Vrasidas Karalis, has recently launched another literary work The Glebe Point Road Blues. It is a collection of stories inspired by one of his most sensitive and personal subject matters to date – his experience living in the Sydney suburb of Glebe for the last thirty years.
Written in both prose and poetry, Professor Karalis manages to eloquently depict the quirky microcosm of social outcasts and eccentric individuals which exist along the road. In fact, snapshots of the lives of these ordinary and sometimes extraordinary people become clearer through their encounters with the unidentified author.
Described by critic David Brooks as “ingenious and disarming in its unique angle of vision,” the literary work transforms Glebe Point Road into a universal landscape of transfiguration and redemption. It becomes a space in which a respectable professor from Sydney University, a larrikin book-seller, a Vietnam veteran and many more, wrestle simultaneously with their angels and demons.
Out of the actualities of their life, the author wants to extract the myths that all the characters unconsciously embody. As a result, they all experience a cosmic melancholy or in the words of Professor Karalis, ‘they get the blues.’
And it is this aspect of the work which gives The Glebe Point Road Blues its metaphysical twist. The two zones of the everyday and the transcendental are cleverly fused.
You can purchase your copy of The Glebe Point Road Blues here.
