Z213: Exit is a 2009 novel by Greek author Dimitris Lyacos. It is the first installment of the Poena Damni trilogy. Despite being the first of the trilogy in narrative order, the book was the third to be published in the series. The work develops as a sequence of fragmented diary entries recording the solitary experiences of an unnamed, Ulysses-like persona in the course of a train voyage gradually transformed into an inner exploration of the boundaries between self and reality. The voyage is also akin to the experience of a religious quest with a variety of biblical references, mostly from the Old Testament, being embedded into the text which is often fractured and foregoing punctuation. Most critics place Z213: Exit in a postmodern context exploring correlations with such writers as Samuel Beckett and Cormac McCarthy while others underline its modernist affinities and the work's firm foundation on classical and religious texts.
Z213: Exit is difficult to classify by genre, and is simultaneously a novella, a poem, and a journal. In contradistinction to "factual report" works such as If This Is a Man by Primo Levi, the work adopts a mode of oneiric realism whereby horror is forced beneath the surface of consciousness only to emerge again in new and increasingly nightmarish forms. Oblique references to tragedies of recent human history are apparent, although, ample Biblical and mythical motives suggest a far broader project. The book can be read as the first volume of a postmodern epic. It is considered as one of the most important anti-utopian works of the 21st century.
Synopsis
The work recounts, in what reads like a personal journal, in verse form as well as in postmodern poetic prose, the wanderings of a man who escapes from a guarded building, in a nightmarish version of a post-Armageddon ambient. In the opening sections of the book, the narrator/protagonist flees from what seems like imprisonment in a building consisting of wards and personnel and from where people are being inexplicably taken away to be thrown into pits. The fugitive leaves the "camp" to get to the nearby train station and starts a journey he records in a "found" bible-like booklet which he turns into his diary. As the journey continues a growing sense of paranoia ensues and the idea of being pursued becomes an increasingly central preoccupation. There are no pursuers to be identified, however, in the course of the journey and the supposed hunt remains a mystery until the end. The environment seems to allude to a decadent futuristic state of a totalitarian kind. The journey is mapped in an indeterminate way, though oblique references create a feeling of a time/space vacuum. The narrator seems to be moving ahead while at the same time being engulfed in his own nightmarish fantasies. Z213: Exit ends with a description of a sacrifice where the protagonist and a "hungry band feasting" roast a lamb on a spit, cutting and skinning its still bleating body and removing its entrails as if observing a sacred rite. The mood is enhanced by the overriding waste-land setting, which could be (it is never explicit) the result of a war that has left the landscape in ruins. The general impression is reminiscent of a spiritual quest or an eschatological experience.