Yanis Varoufakis, the former Greek finance minister known for his leather jackets and austerity critiques, has written a new book that departs from his usual economic fare. Raise Your Soul uses the lives of five female relatives to tell a counter-history of postwar Greece, blending memoir with political analysis.
The book profiles his mother Eleni, a pioneering chemistry student; his paternal grandmother Anna, a Cairo socialite turned feminist radical; his maternal grandmother Trisevgeni, who was illiterate until her 60s; Georgia, the grandmother of his first wife; and his second wife Danaë Stratou, a conceptual artist. Through their stories, Varoufakis explores themes of patriarchy, autocracy, and resistance.
Varoufakis also weaves in his own autobiography, from his time at the University of Essex to his political mission to reform Greece. The book was written after a 2023 assault he called a “brazen fascist attack”, making it a therapeutic exercise as well as a historical account.
Critics note that while the book works as microhistory, it is marred by Varoufakis’s bloviating style and tendency to treat his subjects as ideological stand-ins rather than fully realised people.
