I fell in love with Kazantzakis long ago when I was in high school. Zorba is one of his most exuberant and hopeful novels, but laced with shadow nonetheless. Gorgeous, and so much more than the film, which did a tremendous and faithful rendering nonetheless. ( )

musty

Zorba is one of the great characters of literature - energetic, passionate and full of life. What a shame, then, that we only get to see him in the three hundred pages where he is acting like a complete arsehole. Again and again the narrator tells us how wonderful Zorba is, but there is absolutely no evidence in Zorba's actions or his words. He is impulsive, selfish and boorish. His contempt for peasants and workers is only surpassed by his contempt for women.

All of this is based on the first hundred pages of this novel before I put it down. I did skip ahead a bit to make sure the book doesn't suddenly change, and I read some reviews to check if I had missed something. It doesn't and I hadn't. ( )

This is another book I read years ago, and now cannot recall what it was like. ( )

One of the rare times when the movie comes close to eclipsing the book (and perhaps does). This, like Jack London's The Sea Wolf, sets to dramatize the conflict between Platonic idealism--here represented in a peculiar mid-20th century fascination with Eastern mysticism--and Epicurean materialism (represented, of course, by Zorba). Unlike London, the battle between the two is a bit more evenly handled here (and Zorba, unlike Wolf Larson, is extremely sympathetic and likeable in many ways). Even so, we end up with a similarly unsatisfying false dichotomy of human "extremes" with rather predictably unsatisfying outcomes. The portrait painted of traditional Greek culture here--Cretan in particular--is remorseless and damning in many ways. In that sense, both characters standing classically (sort of) athwart the Orthodox tradition are redeemed but largely ineffectually so--much as Plato, Epicurus (not to mention Zeno, Aristotle, etc.) are treated in Greek intellectual and cultural life even now. ( )