“…One day, as I was working silently, he threw out, ‘Your melancholy is not emotional. You have conceptual melancholy, that’s why we match.’ And I somewhat half-understood that the concepts of things can be more terrifying than the things themselves.” Eva Bey, With Nikos Karouzos - Diary

The painter Eva Bey lived alongside the poet Nikos Karouzos during the last ten years of his life. During this time, she used to keep scattered diary notes, the majority of which revolved around their shared life. For many years, this material remained dormant, locked away in a drawer.

Thanks to her decision to publish it in a book, an important testimony about the poet from a companion reaches our hands, a woman who experienced him in the grind of daily life and later endured the entire ordeal of his health, from the Royal Marsden in London to the end, at the Health hospital.

Bey handles her material like a mosaic that aims for the big picture. Amid observations about the era and its people, as well as art, she provides us with an insightful, perhaps unique, portrait of the personality and character of Nikos Karouzos.