The "Difficult Nights" and "My House", to which "Do You Want to Dance, Maria?" should be added, and somewhat less so, the rest of Axioti's works, are addressed to a vigilant reader willing to make continuous effort. They must be ready to accept the syntactic surprises that arise every time, to navigate through the labyrinth of inconsistent patterns, parenthetical phrases, unfinished sentences, sentences where the normal word order is disrupted, to embrace unexpected idioms and idiomatic vocabulary (which is present in almost the entire modern Greek literature, but rarely with such density), to penetrate the system of personal pronouns, and above all, to be sensitive to the intense, purely literary pleasure that emanates from this whole.
At this level, as well as at the level of conception and composition, Axioti's works are a triumph of literature.
The narrator's language largely belongs to oral speech. Most of the stylistic features mentioned belong to this speech. This is the case with the inconsistent patterns, unfinished words and phrases, parenthetical sentences, disrupted word order, asymmetries, free agreement of sentence terms, and of course, the idiomatic expressions concerning morphology, vocabulary, and phraseology. Axioti's language is mostly the language of oral speech, but despite its folk color, it is often a high language, a fact that explains its affinity with folk songs.
Axioti's works are far, very far from oral literature. On the contrary, they are, as much as possible, written. And this is most evident precisely at the stylistic level. The variety of style depending on the places, characters, and situations, the play with different linguistic levels, the citation of old texts, the occasional presence of classical rhetoric, the use of poetic means, the constant surprises for the reader, the presence of sections "for anthology", are sure proofs of this.
Michel Sonier studies and comments on the great works of Melpos Axioti in this book: "Difficult Nights", "Do You Want to Dance, Maria?", "Twentieth Century", "My House", "The Cadmus", as well as the poetic sections "Coincidence", "Contraband", and "Seaside".