Live Encounters Poetry & Writing June 2026
Tim Tomlinson Review of
Tango in Blue Nights by Vasilis Manousakis.
Liotrivi Pubs, 2025
Tango in Blue Nights, a linked collection of micro- and flash fiction, reminds me of what we used to call “trip” glasses, those tinted spectacles for psychedelic occasions whose swollen lenses angled into numerous facets. When you look through trip glasses, you see the color-filtered world reproduced a dozen, maybe two dozen times on multiple picture frames, each frame containing exactly the same picture. You wonder which one is the real picture, when they’re all real and at the same time none are. They’re all projections, and the real one is the one inside, and that’s, of course, the one hardest to ascertain. But that’s the one that Greek writer, poet, translator, professor, and psychologist Vasilis Manousakis seems most interested to probe. Don’t waste your time studying all those identical images, Manousakis seems to be saying, look instead at the apparatus making them: your mind.
Where the trip glasses analogy breaks down somewhat is in content, because in Tango‘s trip gallery, each picture frame is different. The collection’s title derives from its most fully realized characters, Pilar, who teaches tango, and Ray, who is hungry to learn. Pilar and Ray appear in many of the pictures along with a gallery of secondaries. Pilar dances, she teaches, she teases, she recedes, she reappears. Ray learns, he’s seduced, he’s jealous, he’s waiting, he’s otherwise involved, but no matter what, Pilar is on his mind. The themes and devices that drive Tango appear explicitly in the opening of “Piano Lessons,” the collection’s second story:
Well, where did you go? thought Ray, sitting ten years later in the same place he had met, loved, danced and lost Pilar. It was three weeks after his anniversary with Katherine, when he had passed by Dolores’ bar–which was no longer Dolores’ bar– and had shown casually to his wife where he once frequented.
We get the desire, the names, the haunting—that crazy salad the consciousness conjures when it settles for a substitute of what it wants. What was Ray thinking, showing his wife the location of his romantic haunting? What did Katherine think? And where is the lost Pilar?
Tango in Blue Nights is a collection of many trips. One is the New York City trip. Here, the Manousakis imagination is uncanny, as it invents a New York City of smoke and wet streets and salsa pulsing from open windows that actual New Yorkers will remember. It’s a place of carnal hijinks and after-hours dance cultures, where the streets and bedrooms and imaginations are haunted by the fallout of past romances. Another trip is Paris, where glasses of wine are shared over views of cemeteries, where pasts are erased, everything seems familiar, and no event is undetermined.
The book’s pavement is cobblestone, its atmosphere mist at night, and its plot noir without the dead bodies (most of the time). Another trip is Dublin, where, in an effort to experience variety, the protagonist does exactly the same thing, day after day. Many of the trips are to unnamed locations. And some trips aren’t trips at all, unless journeys to the center of the self can be considered a form of travel.
One such story is the aptly named “Numb,” whose narrator composes a letter to someone while slowly freezing in an aircraft forced to land in some uncharted Antarctic tundra. “My dear,” it begins, and what follows at first resembles a Pam Houston travel story of a flight gone wrong. Then we’re in Hemingway country, “The Snows of Kilamanjaro,” which envisions the places the mind traverses when death is imminent. Other evocations emerge in its three compact pages. The Beatles’ “I Am the Walrus” with its echo of the Upanishads, the movie Shark Tale, and Derek Walcott’s beautiful poem, “Love After Love.”
Perhaps the most frequently evoked literary source is Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities, in which imaginary urban landscapes are organized around themes of desire, memory, names, and signs. Manousakis does not organize Tango in Blue Nights quite as literally, yet voices, narrative strategies, and thematic motifs recur throughout. Letters sent or not sent, opportunities missed, desires suppressed, stories dead-ended—these drive the irregular routes of the narratives.
Some of the stories work playful reimaginings of earlier work that occupies what we might call the Manousakis canon. Hemingway’s “A Clean Well-Lighted Place,” Beckett’s Godot, a hit song by The Clash. “Insomnia” evokes the scenario of Krzysztof Kieślowski’s The Double Life of Veronique. Three urban dwellers, living in close proximity, pass each other every day as complete strangers, yet connect at night through furtive acts of voyeurism.
The action of “What Harm Could There Be?”, set to a soundtrack featuring The Cure and the Sisters of Mercy, is something of a dating-app reenactment of the old chestnut from Johnny Guitar Watson: “I was looking back to see if she was looking back to see if I was looking back at her.”
Often the story velocity is at maximum warp: a premise is announced, and ka-pow, conflict. Sometimes a premise is announced, and … nothing. You turn the page, unfulfilled, bewildered. And you remember what Barthes once said: Literature is the question minus the answer. These stories raise questions, and move on.
Sometimes they masquerade as conventional narratives that promise satisfying resolutions. “Raisin Heart,” for instance. Here, the reader is told that the twenty-year-old protagonist has enjoyed the experience of pain since the age of nine. He learns of an establishment that specializes in providing pain. What follows is as vivid and enigmatic as a song by the Velvet Underground. But “Raisin Heart” illuminates so much at the heart of other stories that present unfulfilled protagonists engaged in a hamster-wheel of futility and psychological torment.
Tango in Blue Nights is a translation of stories written originally in Greek. A preface describes the translation process. Manousakis himself was deeply involved, as was his most significant collaborator, the scholar/translator Vilelmini Sosoni. I defer to the preface for the rest of the translation’s process—it’s worth a look.
Tango in Blue Nights is a singular collection. It draws on so much you recognize, and it takes you to familiar places that feel, at first, strange. Its peculiar effect is best articulated by these lines from “You’re Far Away”:
That’s what happens with words. We do not know their impact, but we feel it later, deep inside.
© Tim Tomlinson
Vasilis Manousakis is a writer, translator, mental health counselor, and university instructor. He has taught or given lectures in universities in Greece, England, the USA, Australia and Cyprus. He is a faculty member of New York Writers Workshop in New York. He is a tenured educator at the University of Patras. He writes and publishes poetry and short prose in Greek and English. His last book is Tango in Blue Nights, Liotrivi Pubs (2025).
He also researches talents and character strengths and he co-authored the book My child you have a talent, a manual for the cultivation of character strengths in children. He is the co-author of the student/teacher manual for Creative Writing for the secondary education, which was approved by the Ministry of Education in Greece, and will be taught in schools from September 2026 onwards. He translates and publishes poetry and short prose in Greece and abroad. He also currently works privately as a Mental Health Counselor, specializing in Cognitive Behavioral Therapy and Mentoring for students and young adults. Finally, he volunteers in prisons and teaches Creative Writing to inmates.
Tim Tomlinson is the author, most recently, of Listening to Fish: Meditations from the Wet World, a hybrid collection of prose, poetry, and photographs concerned with the splendors of, and the perils facing, the world’s coral reefs. He is also the author of poetry collection, Requiem for the Tree Fort I Set on Fire, and the short story collection, This Is Not Happening to You. He is a founder and co-director of New York Writers Workshop. He teaches in NYU’s Global Liberal Studies and the Deledda Master in Creative Writing & Translation in Sardinia.