The Route And Fare

A historical novel written with the technique of magical realism, the first part of a trilogy. January 5th, 1945: On the last night before its destruction at the close of the December Events, a female car, endowed with the rare gift of universal empathy, narrates her life story, a very real yet unbelievable story that begins in the Great-Depression America, continues in the Interwar-period Europe and ends in the Occupied Athens in between the Great Famine, the Resistance and civil division. She remembers her Ovidian transformations from a luxurious limousine into a taxicab and a steam powered Gazogène and from a passenger car into an ambulance, a hearse, and a hideout. She ponders on the complex and contradictory relationship between Machine and its constructors and users. But mostly, she talks about the individual destinies of the people who bought, rented, drove or used her, about famous and worldly people, humble citizens and aristocrats, capitalists, merchants, proletarians as well as about the destitute, outcasts, refugees, servants, prostitutes and black marketeers, soldiers, executioners and victims, members of the resistance and quislings and revolution professionals, traitors and heroes, innocent and guilty, the Daedalic stonewalling of fate and History that brought them all together like fellow passengers on a long journey with an uncertain destination and an unbearable fare.