If anyone wants to decide whether a given country is modern, he has to start with an examination of what he means by modernity. Faubion examines this question admirably in this challenging but peculiarly beautiful book, but his work is so complex and so insightful that anyone undertaking to review it should probably ... have his head examined.

Faubion is endowed with -- or has acquired -- a splendid vocaulary of great precision that serves him well in all the tenuously nuanced dimensions of the present-day Greek reality he explores here. His syntax is baroquely elaborate, almost theatrical (in a sense of excellent theatre) and some of his longer sentences are not fully comprehensible on the first go. But that is no problem because the reader can always have a second go at any given sentence and in the process learn how real writers with real ideas, like Faubion, go about their business.

This is a hermeneutics of contemporary Athens and, by extension, of modern Greece, which is to say that the author regards meaning as the mediator between experience and consciousness and therefore undertakes a search for analogues adequate to trace a movement from unmediated experience to the historical consciousness in the several realms of meaning into which it (hopefully) differentiates.

Superimposing on this hermeneutics a specifically literary turn, he adopts from Harold Bloom -- and uses as an analytic tool -- a figure called ... metalepsis, which may be the poetic face of what we tyro Hegelians call sublation.

When the author mentions his field experience among highly educated cosmopolites in Kolonaki, one thinks back with compassion on linguist an anthropologist friends suffering through field work in the wilds of West Africa or Borneo (life really isn't fair, is it?).

The book offers not only an exploration of the historical consciousness of some few Greeks, but also tests social and cultural theory (Weber, Schiller, Foucault) and critiques some widely held positions in the fields of sociology and anthropology. To use a well worn scheme, Faubion clearly favors considerations of strategy, process and practice over rule, structure and theory. He outlines the historically constructivist (as distinct from classicist or essentialist) Greek self-understanding as it comes forth from his associates who function as field informants. On this basis he discusses anecdotally the sunsettled relations between such aspects of modern life as economics and politics, tradition and modernity, among many others.

I would venture to say that most hermeneuts of the Ricoeur school may experience difficulty with the author's position on the relation between writers and the texts they produce, but even if he rejects textual autonomy he still offers valuable insights on some modern Greek writers and their position in society. His treatment of the whole question of sexual liberation and identity is also excellent.