Níkos Kazantzákis (1883–1957)

Forget Anthony Quinn and Alan Bates in their smart suits - there's no-one even remotely Mexican or British in this novel. Although ... Alan Bates does have more than a whiff of D.H. Lawrence about him, and what with coal-mining, homosocial bonding, fights, sexually-charged scenery, cycle-of-the-seasons, and intellectuals trying to get in touch with their human side, this sometimes does feel like Women in Love with added citrus trees ...

The narrator is a young writer who, still smarting at show more being accused of being a mere bookworm by his best friend (who has gone off to do humanitarian work in the Caucasus), decides to take a break from intellectual life and have a go at "being a capitalist" in the real world by running a lignite mine he's inherited on the Cretan shore. As sidekick and adviser on practical matters, he recruits a working man he's picked up in a bar in Piraeus, the gloriously muscled and moustached Alexis Zorbas.

The two of them rapidly become close friends as they move into their hut on the beach and connect with the local Cretan villagers. The narrator enjoys Zorba's stories of his long and varied life, in the course of which he has formed his own eccentric moral system, based not on any arbitrary rules or conventions but on his unmediated experience of what gives pain or pleasure to himself and the people around him. And when he runs out of words, he picks up his santuri or starts to dance.

But the narrator is tortured by a growing appreciation of the sterility of his own book-learning. Fortunately, he doesn't just have to sit there and enjoy vicarious experience through Zorba - the two of them get involved with the cycle of village life, with the Cretan scenery, with the mine, with the monks up on top of the mountain, and with relationships with two local women. Or rather non-relationships: the real conversations in this book are always between men, whilst interactions between men and women are only ever about food or sex...

Lots of sunshine, olive and citrus trees, beaches, caiques, moustaches, passion, poverty, tragedy-of-war, evocations of Greek, Cretan, Ottoman and Slav culture and the glorious past, and lots of juxtaposition of complex, transcendental experiences of God with the prosaic, smelly detail of everyday Orthodox religious practice. Whatever else you might say about Kazantzakis - and there are a lot of good things you need to say about him - rather like Lawrence, he is not a writer you will ever catch out understating something. Whenever he gets the adjectives out, you need the subwoofer engaged and the dial turned to eleven. show less

Nikos Kazantzakis acknowledges at the beginning of his autobiographical novel Report to Greco that the idea for the book was inspired by Francesco Petrarch’s Letters to Cicero. This deliberate analogy is not a literary game, but rather a moral and spiritual dialogue with a dead teacher. Kazantzakis chooses the figure of El Greco as his “father,” “judge,” and “witness,” before whom he decides to give an account of his life.

And Kazantzakis indeed has much to say—entirely show more understandable for one of the major literary landmarks of the twentieth century. Yet although what he says is genuinely valuable and compelling, I personally did not respond to the way in which he chooses to say it. The emphasis on his own exceptional nature and erudition, veiled behind the modest origins of his mother’s family and the lack of education on his father’s side, and lavishly bathed in Orthodox faith, reads to me as pomposity and a desire for self-display, leaving a bitter aftertaste after the writer’s verbal bacchanalia.

Kazantzakis presents himself in two mise-en-scènes: as a Greek in Greece, and as a Greek abroad (primarily in France). In the first, we encounter an Old Testament Kazantzakis, retelling biblical parables and legends of wandering souls and monks devoted to fasting and self-sacrifice in the name of a terrifying and ferocious God, hungry for human blood and sacrifice in the service of His own grandeur. We also hear the thoughts of Jehovah and Buddha, spoken through the mouth of an orthodox author, seasoned with Greek pathos and placed within a Balkan context.

On foreign soil, we hear the author conversing with himself; we sense his perceptions of the birth of Übermenschen, his terror of shadows that stubbornly linger beside him, Joycean philosophizing, an endless procession of quotations from thinkers, an unceasing mill of words and high-flown figures, dialogues with himself in the second and third person, the exaltation and simultaneous pitying of his own heart. An endlessly sophisticated and highly intellectual logorrhea.

A master at constructing literary figures whose perfection I have long admired, Kazantzakis here, in my reading, remains hardest to accept precisely when he speaks about himself. show less

Zorba the Greek is one of the great characters in literature: larger than life, and living it on his terms, to the fullest, and with intensity in everything he does. In his simplistic way he is profound and embodies philosophy; he does not read the words of other men or seek out religion to find a higher meaning, he just lives it, seeing “everything every day as if for the first time”. The intellectual who meets him on his way to Crete has his values questions and life transformed by show more their adventures together. It’s a great book.

Quotes:
On compassion:
“But at times I was seized with compassion. A Buddhist compassion, as cold as the conclusion of a metaphysical syllogism. A compassion, not only for men but for all life which struggles, cries, weeps, hopes and does not perceive that everything is a phantasmagoria of nothingness.”

On saying goodbye:
“I watched him and I reflected what a truly baffling mystery is this life of ours. Men meet and drift apart again like leaves blown by the wind; your eyes try in vain to preserve an image of the face, body, or gestures of the person you have loved; in a few years you do not even remember whether his eyes were blue or black.”

On living life:
“Look, one day I had gone to a little village. An old grandfather of ninety was busy planting an almond tree. ‘What, granddad!’ I exclaimed. ‘Planting an almond tree?’ And he, bent as he was, turned round and said: ‘My son, I carry on as if I should never die.’ I replied: ‘And I carry on as if I was going to die any minute.’ Which of us was right, boss?’”

“I said nothing, but I felt a deep joy. This, I thought, is how great visionaries and poets see everything – as if for the first time. Each morning they see a new world before their eyes; they do not really see it, they create it.”

“This is what a real man is like, I thought, envying Zorba’s sorrow. A man with warm blood and solid bones, who lets real tears run down his cheeks when he is suffering; and when he is happy he does not spoil the freshness of his joy by running it through the fine sieve of metaphysics.”

And this one, on the dangers of living life too safely:
“Luckless man has raised what he thinks is an impassable barrier round his poor little existence. He takes refuge there and tries to bring a little order and security into his life. A little happiness. Everything must follow the beaten track, the sacrosanct routine, and comply with safe and simple rules. Inside this enclosure, fortified against the fierce attacks of the unknown, his petty certainties, crawling about like centipedes, go unchallenged. There is only one formidable enemy, mortally feared and hated: the Great Certainty. Now, this Great Certainty had penetrated the outer walls of my existence and was ready to pounce upon my soul.”

On reading, writing, and education:
“If only I could live again the moment of that anger which surged up in me when my friend called me a bookworm! I recalled then that all my disgust at the life I had been leading was personified in those words. How could I, who loved life so intensely, have let myself be entangled for so long in that balderdash of books and paper blackened with ink!”

“I stooped to pick up the pages scattered on the floor. I had neither the strength nor the desire to look at them. As if all that sudden rush of inspiration had been merely a dream which I no longer wished to see imprisoned in words and debased by them.”

“African savages worship the serpent because its whole body touches the ground and it must, therefore, know all the earth’s secrets. It knows them with its belly, with its tail, with its head. It is always in contact or mingled with the Mother. The same is true of Zorba. We educated people are just empty-headed birds of the air.”

“You swallow everything your books say, but just think a moment what the people who write books are like! Pff! a lot of schoolmasters. What do they know about women, or men who run after women? Not the first thing!’ … ‘All those who actually live the mysteries of life haven’t the time to write, and all those who have the time don’t live them!’”

On God:
“I closed my eyes, soothed. A quiet, mysterious pleasure took possession of me – as if all that green miracle around me were paradise itself, as if all the freshness, airiness, and sober rapture which I was feeling were God. God changes his appearance every second. Blessed is the man who can recognize him in all his disguises. At one moment he is a glass of fresh water, the next your son bouncing on your knees or an enchanting woman, or perhaps merely a morning walk.”

“’Have you ever noticed, boss, everything good in this world is an invention of the devil? Pretty women, spring, roast suckling, wine – the devil made them all! God made monks, fasting, chamomile-tea and ugly women…pooh!’”

“Would God bother to sit over the earthworms and keep count of everything they do? And get angry and storm and fret himself silly because one went astray with the female earthworm next door or swallowed a mouthful of meat on Good Friday? Bah! Get away with you, all you soup-swilling priests! Bah!”

On happiness:
“I was happy, I knew that. While experiencing happiness, we have difficulty in being conscious of it. Only when the happiness is past and we look back on it do we suddenly realize – sometimes with astonishment – how happy we had been.”

“I felt once more how simple and frugal a thing is happiness: a glass of wine, a roast chestnut, a wretched little brazier, the sound of the sea. Nothing else. And all that is required to feel that here and now is happiness is a simple, frugal heart.”

“This is true happiness: to have no ambition and to work like a horse as if you had every ambition. To live far from men, not to need them and yet to love them.”

On money; I’ve always liked this analogy of money not being everything in life, but providing ‘wings’:
“He was waiting impatiently for the day when he would earn a fortune, when his wings would be sufficiently big – ‘wings’ was the name he gave to money – for him to fly away.”

On old age:
“What scares me, boss, is old age. Heaven preserve us from that! Death is nothing – just pff! and the candle is snuffed out. But old age is a disgrace.”

On recurrence, and life, and oneness:
“For thousands of years young girls and boys have danced beneath the tender foliage of the trees in spring – beneath the poplars, firs, oaks, planes and slender palms – and they will go on dancing for thousands more years, their faces consumed with desire. Faces change, crumble, return to earth; but others rise to take their place. There is only one dancer, but he has a thousand masks. He is always twenty. He is immortal.”

On transience:
“The unfailing rhythm of the seasons, the ever-turning wheel of life, the four facets of the earth which are lit in turn by the sun, the passing of life – all these filled me once more with a feeling of oppression. Once more there sounded within me, together with the cranes’ cry, the terrible warning that there is only one life for all men, that there is no other, and that all that can be enjoyed must be enjoyed here. In eternity no other chance will be given to us.
A mind hearing this pitiless warning – a warning which, at the same time, is so compassionate – would decide to conquer its weakness and meanness, its laziness and vain hopes and cling with all its power to every second which flies away forever.” show less

It gains some momentum at the end, but the first three hundred pages, what a painful slog!

Really, this is a philosophy book wrapped in boring fiction. It is the struggle between trying to know the abstract and eternal versus trying to know the experience of now. But you don't have to choose, so now you don't have to read this book.

Also, every page is just dripping in testosterone, self-importance, and male privilege. This doesn't even qualify for the Bechdel Test. There is only one named show more female character and she only talks about men. But it doesn't matter, because she is a whore. show less