In all this, here is something incredible. A pair of wild pheasants landed in our parts. Unprecedented! They came to spend the winter in the land of the hungry. Challenge. But the soul of the Greek: No one bothered them, even though we suffered from their news. Every day someone saw them. Sometimes in the olive grove, sometimes behind the chicken coop, sometimes in the old outhouse. Anyone who looked at them turned strange. They were enchanted by their sight and had optimistic thoughts. Like possessed, they spoke illogical things. For the glory of the nation, for the greatness of our politicians, for the lost homelands, for the superiority of the race, for economic independence. It seems they had been exposed enough to the sight of exotic birds. But even the others, who had seen them fleetingly, spoke of prosperity, repayments, investments, and development.

What is crazier, the pen of the author or the Greek reality itself? What happens when the couches eat us instead of us eating them? In a peculiar tableau of magical storytelling and dry realism, Dimitris Magriples records struggling, surreal images and stories from urban and rural Greece of overconsumption and the ensuing crisis. The invincible mechanisms of Greek bureaucracy, the representatives of the church and the so-called "social organizations," the entrepreneur, the farmer, the contractor, all compose a grotesque mosaic of the country, which at a second glance does not seem so far-fetched from reality.