An evening with Ilja Leonard Pfeijffer
Passa Porta – Flagey
His previous novel - Grand Hotel Europa - is well on its way to becoming an unflinching everseller and there is already the next one: Alkibiades. Ilja Leonard Pfeijffer introduces his magnum opus on blind ambition and populism during an interview with Ruth Joos.
With his new novel Alkibiades, Ilja Leonard Pfeijffer returns to his great love: the classics. He brings us the true story of the striving and failure of Alkibiades, the most beautiful man in Greece.
Ten years after La Superba (Libris Literature Prize) and five years after Grand Hotel Europa, Ilja Leonard Pfeijffer is back with a monumental, richly documented historical novel.
Alkibiades was the extravagant, brilliant, sensational, androgynous, bisexual and controversial politician and strategist of Athens during the Great War against Sparta. His story is for us a journey through time to the world almost two and a half millennia ago, when more and more symptoms, disturbingly recognisable to us, began to indicate the decline of democracy and actually led to the defeat of Athens. The question is to what extent Alkibiades was to blame for this. Was he the populist who dismantled democracy or could he have been the saviour of Athens?
In Pfeijffer's novel, he gives an account of his ideals, strategies and lifelong struggles.
Flagey, Passa Porta
*subject to change
