Zorba the Greek by Nikos Kazantzakis
My rating: 4 of 5 stars “Life is trouble, Boss,” or “My faith is a mosaic of unbelief” The anonymous 35-year-old narrator is a learned, intellectual book-worm (a “pen pusher”) writing a book on Buddha when he decides to go to Crete to run a lignite mine and hires a craggy 60-something year old rogue called Alexis Zorba, who seems to have been everywhere (Constantinople, Bulgaria, Greece, Anatolia, etc.) and to have done everything (worked, fought, married, fathered, danced, sang, etc.) and to have an inexhaustible wealth of anecdotes and questions and opinions about human nature, men and women, life, love, God, and so on. Zorba’s duties will be supervising the workers, cooking, talking, and playing his santuri (when he’s in the mood to do so). Zorba, the narrator soon realizes, is a free man, a living heart, a great soul, a voracious mouth who experiences everything in life as if for the first time. The narrator knows that while he has been reading and writing, Zorba has been fully living: “I stopped, ashamed. That 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." He knows the happiest days of his life will be spending time with Zorba. Will he be able to exorcise the non-human perfect nothingness of the Buddha and depart from his careful, detached book learning and philosophy to embrace life? Nikos Kazantzakis' Zorba the Greek (1946) consists of various episodes involving Zorba (usually as instigator and main actor) and the narrator (usually as observer and side player). Zorba quickly seduces Madame Hortense, an “old Siren,” a faded and flabby French ex-chanteuse hotel owner, and takes over the work of the mine, letting the narrator, “Boss,” work on his book on Buddha or muse on life, the divine, and human nature. Being a “pen pusher,” the narrator is attracted to Zorba’s charismatic, passionate, earthy, frank, wily, irreverent approach to religion, patriotism, war, love, marriage, and life. Many impressive moments: a voluptuous widow running through the rain; Zorba and the narrator visiting a mountain-top monastery; Zorba going to Candia to buy materials to make a cable-train; Zorba consecrating (with the help of the monks) said cable-train; the villagers attacking the widow; a death and a funeral; the narrator writing letters to and receiving letters from his dear friend; Zorba telling the narrator about God. It is a lyrical, earthy, funny look at the Cretan countryside and people, still somewhat under the afterimage influence of the decaying Ottoman Empire. Lots of Greek and Cretan culture, like food, religion, work, music, religion, etc. Interesting how they kind of not-completely seriously talk or sing or bless about getting Constantinople back from the Turks. Throughout there are many references to world literature and art and religion, like Rodin, Dante, Buddha, Rembrandt, Homer, and Hindu statues, and many observations and conversations on spirit and body and world and marriage and religion and soul and body and human nature and food and icons and so on. When the narrator is trying to get to know his workers and to kindle in them the idea that we are all brothers, Zorba warns him not to open people's eyes unless you have something better to show them. If all you have is darkness, then what's the point? And there are some fine lines on human resilience in the face of tragedy and unhelpful (if not malevolent) gods. I liked Zorba’s frank disdain for organized religion and monks and all (he’d rather a priest curse him than bless him!). Rich stuff! Like in the following description of drinking Cretan wine: “We clinked glasses and tasted the wine, an exquisite Cretan wine, a rich red colour, like hare's blood. When you drank it, you felt as if you were in communion with the blood of the earth itself and you became a sort of ogre. Your veins overflowed with strength, your heart with goodness! If you were a lamb you turned into a lion. You forgot the pettiness of life, constraints all fell away. United to man, beast and God, you felt that you were one with the universe.” One thing that felt dated in the novel was, despite its woman-worship, its sexism. Zorba says things about women, “the female of the species,” like God made woman not from Adam’s rib but from Satan’s horns, so anywhere you touch a women you’re touching Satan, and “women have an unhealable wound making them desire to be desired by men,” and “Only people who want to be free are human beings. Women don't want to be free. Are they human?” The old siren Madame Hortense is a comic figure for the narrator, the young widow a frightening pantheress. It is a male-oriented book, with the main relationships being male-male (the narrator and his best friend from his class and background and the narrator and Zorba). Male-female relationships are necessary but transitory and secondary here. (view spoiler)[The fates of the two women we see involved with Zorba and the narrator, the Old Siren and the widow, are unnecessarily awful and or violent, with little real sadness or outrage from the narrator. (hide spoiler)] It is a talky novel, though Zorba is sure fun to listen to, and the audiobook reader George Guidall is great as Zorba--hectoring, leering, savoring, seducing words with his voice—and readers into passionate, lyrical, philosophical novels about life and Greek/Cretan culture should like it. View all my reviews
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