Constantine Cavafy is today unquestionably the most widely read, widely translated and widely inspiring of all modern Greek poets. Why so? In his passionate and often breathtaking book, Dimitris Papanikolau reiterates what others have claimed before him: that Cavafy is an exemplary modern; that he is a trenchant critic of the moral atmosphere of his time; that he is homosexual. Papanikolaou, however, doesn't constrain himself to affirming again what—in the Anglophone world at least—is now common opinion. He gives it a twist. His Cavafy is quite so modern and quite so trenchant a moral critic ‘because he is homosexual’ (49; emphasis in the original).

On the face of it, the twist might seem modest. Didn't the editors of and contributors to a special 1983 issue of The Journal of Hellenic Studies already assert as much? Papanikolaou cites their precedent—but proceeds to bring to what was going on in that upper-storey Alexandrian flat on rue Lepsius a light much more dazzling than any we have yet seen. Papanikolaou's Cavafy tests the waters of Decadence and Aestheticism without drowning in either one of them. In his life as in his art, he proves himself to be a master strategist of the dialectic of hiding and revealing that underpins the epistemology of the closet (147). His erotic poems reveal less of an ambition to cultivate a lyrical voice than to give collective representation to the sensibility and responsibility that may be or may become available to those vulnerable selves ‘made like him’ as a ‘new phase of love’ unfolds. Papanikolaou's Cavafy is an erotist. He is also an ethicist. He is ‘radical’ on both counts.

Papanikolau takes from the later Foucault his guiding analytical framework—and masterfully so. He calls on the broader resources of queer theory as he needs them. He occasionally casts Cavafy as ‘gay’—a term he finds as ‘productive’ as it is anachronistic (14). He is more emphatic in casting the poet as a homosexual, but is far from taking even this classification for granted. It rather functions as his point of reference and return in a lengthy investigation of the extent to which Cavafy is drawn into and draws upon the regime of truth of a rapidly coalescent biopolitcs in which homosexuals as we still know them have their discursive birthplace. His scholarly treatment of the sexological writings of the early 20^th century is far more extensive than Foucault's treatment of them in the first volume of The History of Sexuality. It pays off. Of particular brilliance is his juxtaposition of the ‘half-naked’ officer who approaches and excites the Italian author of the Roman d’un inverti—a confessional text sent to Emile Zola, but ultimately published in the Archives d’anthropologie criminelle et de psychologie normale et pathologique in 1896 under the pseudonymous editorship of Georges St.-Paul—and the ‘half-open clothes’ of the lovers in Cavafy's ‘To Remain’ (or better, ‘Remaining’), published in 1919. Papanikolaou amasses evidence from Cavafy's diaristic notes that suggests that he had read the Roman and that the imagery of ‘Remaining’ reflects his encounter with it. His argument is original and persuasive, but by his own account, it's less than definitive. Perhaps it can never be definitive—but Papanikolaou urges the current keepers of the Cavafy archive to open its doors to scholars who might come closer to settling the case. He is adamant in insisting that, until its doors open, it can only come under the suspicion that it is suppressing more than it is revealing of the closet that Cavafy methodically stocked for posterity. His objections to what he regards as a concerted effort among Hellenophone biographers and literary critics to ‘dehomosexualize’ the poet precede this complaint (53). Papanikolaou could have written his book in English—and let's hope we’ll have it in English sooner rather than later. His bold challenge to Hellenophone archivists, biographers and critics, past and present, surely informs his decision to write the book in Greek.

Cavafy as homoeroticist and homoethicist: Papanikolaou sparkles with originality in his sustained analytical attention to the poet's long and increasingly refined series of erotic poems. Not a small number of Cavafy's readers (this author included) have been less than impressed by the poet's lyrical achievements in many of those poems. Almost all readers have been vexed by his ‘discretion’, which almost always leaves the gender of his erotic actors in suspension. Papanikolaou doesn't reject our disappointment (244), but directs us to another and much less simplistic engagement with what is available of the Cavafian corpus (poetic and prosaic) of the Cavafian corpus. He invites us—and, to my mind, ultimately persuades us—to recognize even in the most ‘stilted and pompous’ of Cavafy's poems an attempt to articulate at once the historical particularities and the general parameters of a form of life whose ‘new phase’ could—if or when liberated from its biopolitical pathologization—blossom at once as a coherent erotism and a coherent ethics (282). Calling on Foucault's conceptualization of the dynamics of ethical subjectivation in the second volume of The History of Sexuality and on the essays concurrent with it, Papanikolaou invites us to read Cavafy's erotic poetry as the concerted attempt to fashion the parameters of and give practical substance to an ethics in which desire is not merely internal but also always a connective tissue that inextricably binds the care of the self to caring for another. Connection is all.

There's much more to appreciate and savour in They Who are Made Like Me. Justice can't be done either to its vision or to the details that sustain it in a brief review. Justice comes in reading the book from its first page to its last—and then reading it again.