The third volume of a great circular work that belongs to the chorus of similar novelistic frescoes by Balzac and Zola. Karagatsis' trilogy - which includes "The Kojambas of Kastropyrgou", "Lost and Gained Blood", and "The Last of Michalos" - has been described by him as "the biological and social history of an urban Greek family from 1821 to the present day."
In the first volume, Karagatsis created a vividly alive central character, Michalos Rousis, who became a renegade because he was governed by the feeling of hedonism. In "Lost and Gained Blood," this same Rousis completes as a figure through the struggles of '21. Now, in the third volume of the series, the author brings to life the last years of Rousis and, together, the early years of free Greece.
The great critic Vassos Varikas wrote about this work: "One of the most significant achievements of the art of a prose writer among the three or four we have... Karagatsis remains in our new prose the faithful continuer of the classical tradition that sees the novel as an autonomous piece of life and refuses to transform it into an essay of collective or individual psychology, as it consciously or unconsciously came to be diminished by the Interwar period."
