Wednesday, June 26, 2013, 6:30 - 8 p.m.
Stephen A. Schwarzman Building, Margaret Liebman Berger Forum
Please join us as Christian Brechneff reads from his recently released memoir, The Greek House: The Story of a Painter’s Love Affair with the Island of Sifnos, on Wednesday, June 26th, at 6:30 p.m. in the Margaret Liebman Berger Forum ( 2nd Floor, Room 227).
To attend, please RSVP to [log in to unmask].
When
Christian Brechneff first set foot on the Greek island of Sifnos, it
was the spring of 1972 and he was a twenty-one-year-old painter
searching for artistic inspiration and a quiet place to work. There,
this Swiss child of Russian émigrés, adrift and confused about his
sexuality, found something extraordinary. In Sifnos, he found a muse, a
subject he was to paint for years, and a sanctuary.
In The Greek House,
Brechneff tells a funny, touching narrative about his relationship to
Sifnos, writing with warmth about its unforgettable residents and the
house he bought in a hilltop farm village. This is the story of how he
fell in love with Greece, and how it became a haven from the
complexities of his life in Western Europe and New York. It is the story
of his village and of the island during the thirty-odd years he owned
the house—from a time when there were barely any roads, to the arrival
of the modern world with its tourists and high-speed boats and the euro.
And it is the story of the end of the love affair—how the island
changed and he changed, how he discovered he had outgrown Sifnos, or
couldn’t grow there anymore.
The Greek House is
a celebration of place and an honest narrative of self-discovery. In
its pages, a naïve and inexperienced young man comes into his own.
Weaving himself into the life of the island, painting it year after
year, he finds a place he can call home.
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