Zorba the Greek

this is a reread for me, but this time I listened to the excellent narration by Guidall. As usual, listening afforded different perspectives. I don't recall the philosophical discussion so intensely from my 'silent' reading, although the other episodes in the novel were more or less as I recalled.

Somewhere around the middle, the story changed for me, from a philosophical argument (already well discussed) to a more picaresque one. But the climactic events were still powerful.

Hearing the story, I was more and more aware of the primitive (for lack of a better word) view that men had of women in this society: enticements to evil, sources of pleasure, creatures desired and feared, the source of joy and disgrace, somehow responsible for all show more man's troubles. Not all of this is religious in context - I get the feeling that this hearkens back to pre-Christian views of nature and the world. It leaves this book very much about the love between men, not necessarily with any homosexual slant or activity, but as a group privileged and buffeted and weighed down by life.

The last exchange between Nikos and Zorba left me feeling very sad, as if Nikos never did understand, or could not act on, the deep feeling between them, and by analogy, the deep primitive feelings in himself. show less

"I think of God as being exactly like me. Only bigger, stronger, crazier."
By sally tarbox on 9 July 2017
Format: Audible Audio Edition
The narrator of this story is an introverted, bookish chap;his close friend has just left to fight for the Greeks suffering in the Caucasus, leaving the narrator traumatized. Shaken by his friend's parting criticism of him as a bookworm, he determines to embrace real life and, while waiting to sail from Piraeus to Crete, where he plans to run a mine, he encounters Alexis Zorba.
A colourful 60-something, Zorba is taken on to run the mine, and together the two enter a primitive world.
Zorba's attitudes, shaped by years of experience, are irreligious and very much of the 'seize the day' variety.

"I don't believe show more in anything or anyone,; only in Zorba. Not because Zorba is better than the others; not at all, not a little bit! He's a brute like the rest! But I believe in Zorba because he's the only being I have in my power, the only one I know. All the rest are ghosts... When I die, everything'll die."

Dancing, drinking, women and the music of his santuri are his interests; but he works hard, has grand plans, and discusses the meaning of life with his contained boss, who's working on a study of Buddhism, and whose continence exasperates Zorba. Zorba's actions sometimes seem kindly - his loving words to Madame Hortense - but it's all dissimulation to keep her sweet.
Some of Zorba's musings have a point. Some are seriously wrong - his cavalier attitude to God; his casual encounters with women. Nonetheless the relationship between the two men is well portrayed,, their final leave-taking moving.
Zorba is more clearly drawn than the narrator - despite an encounter with a woman, we strongly suspect the latter to be homosexual, his feelings for the absent Stavridaki consume him. I was baffled at his lack of apparent emotion when said woman is involved in a serious incident.
Life in early 20th century Crete is vividly brought to life: the festivals, the church, the people and the scenery, life, love and death.
This is an enjoyable work, very memorable characters, though you wont find a coherent answer to the meaning of life! show less

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 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 show more 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

I read Zorba the Greek every couple of years, and it never fails to inspire (and, at times, disgust) me. Zorba is the ultimate expression of a "free" human being. He is unfettered by social convention and lives always in the present. In Zorba the Greek, Kazantzakis fully captures the agony, beauty, filth and vulnerability of being human.

What a strange machine man is! You fill him with bread, wine, fish, and radishes, and out comes sighs, laughter, and dreams.

I don't know how to rank Zorba the Greek. It's a complex work that evokes strong emotions. It has an intricate storyline. An upper-class Greek intellectual in his early thirties (our unnamed narrator) sets out for Crete, ostensibly to build a lignite mine. World War I has ended, and Greece is engaged in the Greco- Turkish War. On the ferry from Athens to Crete, he meets Alexis Zorba, a Macedonian peasant twice his age who has traveled extensively and worked as a soldier, cook, field hand, miner, and whatever comes his way. Our narrator, taken by Zorba's gregarious nature, hires him to manage his mine. Despite age, show more circumstance, and temperament differences, they become close friends who enjoy engaging in philosophical debate.

Zorba is a man of action who lives life to its fullest and sees the world anew each day, enjoying work, food, nature, sex, music, and dance with gusto. He is not well educated but has considerable depth and bases his ideas on his lived experience with war, political movements, organized religion, and women. On the other hand, our narrator is highly educated but tends to retreat from the world and live through ideas he finds in books. His current passion is Buddhism.

The plot unfolds as Kazantzakis chronicles events on the island and their ongoing debates as Zorba tells the stories that form the basis of his ideas. His determination to find joy despite the horrors of war and the abject poverty of village life is intoxicating for the narrator. However, while I enjoyed Zorba's tales and the protagonists' philosophical bantering, I found Zorba's attitude towards women galling.

Kazantzakis depicts Zorba as a jovial womanizer with deep-seated chauvinistic beliefs. Zorba repeatedly refers to women as the "female species" and describes them as " sickly creatures and complainers...who want everyone who sees them to admire them." He believes it is men's job to protect and indulge them.

There are two main female characters, Madame Hortense, an aging French Courtesan who Zorba "charitably" takes as a lover, and the widow who is the object of lust of the village men. Zorba continuously encourages the narrator to become more engaged in life and pushes him to become the widow's lover.

Reading these depictions and the attitudes toward women upset me because it most likely accurately portrays the beliefs and actions of men from small villages during this time (Zorba was born in 1865.) and probably exist in many places worldwide today. Kazantakis's shocking depiction of the widow's demise demonstrates the horrific consequences these beliefs can have on women's lives. It is a scene that will stay with me for a long time.

Zorba the Greek is a challenging read. I both loved and hated it at times.
I highly recommend it.

Kazantzakis based the character of Zorba on a real man. See article below

https://greekreporter.com/2022/07/04/the-story-of-the-real-life-alexis-zorbas-un.... show less

“The human soul is heavy, clumsy, held in the mud of the flesh. Its perceptions are still coarse and brutish. It can divine nothing clearly, nothing with certainty. If it could have guessed, how different this separation would have been.”

I’m sure I lost something by reading this in English. Well, at least Wikipedia tells me so, and I’m only too willing to agree. Demotic Greek versus Katharevousa? The head fairly spins for, yes, it is all Greek to me. Or: Είναι όλα ελληνικά για μένα. See what I mean? Like when I’d found out after reading 𝘛𝘩𝘦 𝘓𝘢𝘴𝘵 𝘛𝘦𝘮𝘱𝘵𝘢𝘵𝘪𝘰𝘯 𝘰𝘧 𝘊𝘩𝘳𝘪𝘴𝘵 that Greek had become fluid enough to co-opt nouns as show more adjectives, and you’d know from which region of Greece it had come from by the suffix. (If memory serves me right, the translator had said Kazantzakis used the specific name of a tree to describe the color of the sky and it was impossible to faithfully render into English.) Ιησούς Χριστός!

And like its original language, I’m sure the original culture from which this novel had sprung can be just as easily lost on a modern reader. Or an American reader. This monolingual American, to be more precise. However, this work did seem awfully sexist—women in the kitchen or bedroom; men in the mines or chugging demijohns of raki at a prostitute’s. Men are allowed to dance and flourish and spit in the eye of God, contemplating their place in this world—the aftermath of explosive being or an afterworld of perfect harmony with a humming, eternal present. Women can cook the bread and sesame sweets and ensure that the male line continues its exploitation. And if you fail the order, the expected norm, you can get your head quite literally cut off. Talk about spinning heads!

Yes, I’m oversimplifying. There surely is much more going on here. Philosophical questions and religious conundrums. But I can’t help feeling the arguments as cheap and watered-down rum against the blood of women spilling on Cretan sand, never having been asked their opinion.

I know it’s about life with a character who’s bigger than life in a world that’s unfailingly tainted by the brutality and force of past generations. I think Zorba could’ve been bigger, actually. He certainly outshone the narrator. But what does it all add up to? If it were merely emblematic of an age, OK . . . I guess. It still seems like weak raki to me. For all its moments of fire and whisking knives and collapsing tunnels, I would’ve preferred less braggadocio and more bravery.

But what the fuck do I know? I don’t speak Greek.

“Man’s heart is a ditch full of blood. The loved ones who have died throw themselves down on the bank of this ditch to drink the blood and so come to life again; the dearer they are to you, the more of your blood they drink.” show less

Zorba, the Greek: The Saint’s Life of Alexis Zorba, is the most joyous, gleeful, unselfconscious story of misogyny I have ever read. It’s also a brilliant piece of literature. Every third page I found paragraphs to ponder, to make note of, to share. So what’s a lady reader to do? First, I recommend it to all young women who sneer at old-school feminism. Secondly, don’t read the book if you take personally, and your blood pressure rises, at violence targeting women simply because the violator loathes the Female. Edify yourself with some other piece of brilliant literature. There’s a surplus of it. Third, read Zorba as alchemical allegory of the male/female opposition, and of our urgent need for the Great Work which joins them show more in harmony. Fourth, be sure to get Peter Bien’s recent translation directly from the Greek original. The classic English version was derived from a previous translation into French, and the translator did not know Greek.
Zorba is a con-man, an opportunist, and a Trickster. He is a liar and a teller of deep truth, depending on which is called for. He the sort of saint called a Holy Fool in Russia. The narrator is a callow, vain, modern sort of fool, perhaps unaware of his own homosexuality, perhaps not … the text is ambiguous.
From Chapter 9, location 1822:
“One evening when [Zorba] returned, he asked me with anguish: ‘Does God exist or does he not exist? What says Your Highness? And if God does exist (everything is possible, after all) how do you imagine him?’
“Shrugging my shoulders, I did not answer.
“‘As for me, Boss, don’t laugh, but I imagine God to be exactly like me. Only taller, stronger, crazier - and immortal. He sits on soft sheepskins, loafing, and his hut is heaven, made not with oil tins, like ours, but with clouds. In his right hand he holds neither a sword nor scales, which are implements for murderers and greengrocers, but a huge sponge filled with water, like a rain cloud. Paradise is to his right, hell to his left. A soul comes, poor wretch, stark naked because it lost its body and is shivering. God observes it, laughing surreptitiously under his mustache while pretending to be a bogeyman. “Come here, you,” he says to the soul, deepening his voice, “come here, accursed one!” He begins the interrogation. The soul falls at God’s feet, shouting, “Aman aman! I have sinned!” Then it takes off, with passion, reciting its sins, more and more of them, endlessly. God is bored. He yawns. “Stop, stop!” he shouts at it. “Stop already! You’re driving me nuts with your racket.” And - fapp! - he gives a swipe with the sponge and erases all the sins. “Make tracks out of here for Paradise,” he tells the soul. “Hey Peter, put this poor fellow in with the others.”” show less