"Moonlight Sonata" is a historical, adventurous love story mystery by Giannis Maris that caused a great impression when it was published in nineteen installments in the newspaper Akropolis in 1959. It has never been published as a book until now.
It is considered one of Giannis Maris' two or three most skillful novels, both in terms of its plot and the ambiguous nature of its main character (Michail Verikkios) and the ambiguous interpretation of his actions.
"Moonlight Sonata" takes place in Athens in 1896, but not during the Olympic Games. The historical background is the hostilities on the borders, on the eve of the defeat by the Ottoman army and the almost dissolution of the Greek state, which at that time extended as far as Thessaly.
Maris also plays with the domestic literary scene of the time: The narrator meets Suris and Roidis, who even provides him with information about Michail Verikkios!
The setting of "Moonlight Sonata": Athens at the end of the 19th century, Plaka, the columns of the Olympian Zeus, Piraeus Street, the Field of Ares, Pinakoton Street (today's Harilaou Trikoupi Street), and the scattered houses around the vineyards of Kallifrona, the present-day Patissia. And the narrator, a twenty-five-year-old, curious about the true nature of the beautiful Michail Verikkios, becomes a witness to a story of deception and passion that shocks him, while his young country is on the verge of collapse.

Giannis Maris' world, as described by A. Apostolidis in his book of the same title and accurately described by Vasilis Vasilikos in "Ten Recommendations in Giannis Maris' Work," is full of social contradictions and internal conflicts, with intrigues and passions, disguises and guilty secrets, but also with clichés, idealizations, and stereotypes: petit bourgeois against cosmopolitanism, honesty - especially in the person of the police officer Beka - against deceit, humble springs against dignity, vulgar girls and luxurious ("high-class") women in the modern Greek version of the femme fatale, gigolos and arrivistes against housewives or legitimate heirs, youthful loves, but also intense erotic passions in foreign bedrooms or summer stays (often with a voyeuristic, pleasure-seeking gaze), ordinary people getting involved in dark affairs that unfold in cosmopolitan places, sometimes against the backdrop of the Occupation or the fate of the Jews, popular types and philandering starlets who disturb the often dull everyday life of some unsuspecting, "average" men, homosexuals and "night butterflies," but also later hippies, characters that make up the post-war, primarily Athenian, "good society" and its "underworld."

Kostas Kalfopoulos