Apartment in Athens

A fine study in humiliation and nobility, and their culmination in tragedy and desperate resolve…its moderateness, lack of exaggeration, and serenity are admirable as the Greek ideal they reflect and honor. Everywhere is the dignity of a style in which there is nothing wasteful and nothing wanting.
— Eudora Welty

I have not read any other book—either of fiction or direct documentation—which has given me the feeling of starving and stifling, of falling back on interior positions, constructing interior defenses, reorganizing and redirecting, behind a mask of submission, the whole structure and aim of one’s life, as Apartment in Athens does.
— Edmund Wilson