Perictione or Freedom

A philosophical novel about the possibility of being free.

Can a person free himself from the bonds of family, academia, and friendship? Is madness the most extreme mode of freedom? Is it possible to read and write without strings?

Ernesto Castro’s second novel tells the story of young Perictione after her arrival in Paris in 1968. The daughter of a Greek-American family, our narrator leaves her native Tarpon Springs behind to open herself up to the world and the future. Thanks to the letters that Perictione writes to her mother, to one of her five brothers (who fled to Prague), to her thesis supervisor and to her best childhood friend, Ele Marsal, we witness one of the most turbulent years of the 20^th century.

Above all, we witness the protagonist’s clash with the idea of freedom, in its most varied uses and abuses: from the crisis of communism in Eastern Europe to the assassination of Martin Luther King, from astrological determinism to prejudices about bisexuality, all with the suggestive company of Professor Marcel Nonclerc and student Françoise Dujoncquoy.

Perictione or Freedom is a wise novel about the human condition and a nod to the epistolary genre. It is also the second volume in the Platonic Trilogy, the narrative debut of the most brilliant thinker of his generation.