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Set before the start of the First World War, this moving fable sees a young English writer set out to Crete to claim a small inheritance. But when he arrives, he meets Alexis Zorba, a middle-aged Greek man with a zest for life. Zorba has had a family and many lovers, has fought in the Balkan wars, has lived and loved - he is a simple but deep man who lives every moment fully and without shame. As their friendship develops, the Englishman is gradually won over, transformed and inspired along with the reader. Zorba the Greek, Nikos Kazantzakis' most popular and enduring novel, has its origins in the author's own experiences in the Peleponnesus in the 1920s. His swashbuckling hero has legions of fans across the world and his adventures are as exhilarating now as they were on first publication in the 1950s. 'There can never be any doubt that Kazantzakis was the possessor of genius.'Sunday Telegraph… (more)
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The classic novel Zorba the Greek is the story of two men, their incredible friendship, and the importance of living life to the fullest. Zorba, a Greek working man, is a larger-than-life character, energetic and unpredictable. He accompanies the unnamed narrator to Crete to work in the narrator’s lignite mine, and the pair develops a singular relationship. The two men couldn’t be further apart: The narrator is cerebral, modest, and reserved; Zorba is unfettered, spirited, and beyond the reins of civility. Over the course of their journey, he becomes the narrator’s greatest friend and inspiration and helps him to appreciate the joy of living.
Zorba has been acclaimed as one of the most remarkable figures in literature; he is a character in the great tradition of Sinbad the Sailor, Falstaff, and Sancho Panza. He responds to all that life offers him with passion, whether he’s supervising laborers at a mine, confronting mad monks in a mountain monastery, embellishing the tales of his past adventures, or making love. Zorba the Greek explores the beauty and pain of existence, inviting readers to reevaluate the most important aspects of their lives and live to the fullest.
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I also thought Zorba was a lazy, lying, thief and would run off at the
I really disliked Zorba’s attitude to life. He acted as though he was a child in a man’s body, he wanted all the pleasures and opportunities but none of the responsibilities. He thought nothing of using others for his pleasures, especially women. The idea that he had many marriages and families but thought nothing of deserting them, was repellent.
The Narrator is never named, and it is unclear what he is doing or why. He often seems as though he is required to do something and yet he never comes out and says it. I am unclear how he supports himself. He talks about having some money to open the coal mine in Crete. Yet he eventually leaves and seems to drift around, with no explanation of how he survives. Is he rich and slumming in Crete, does he do some kind of work, or is he the one who is the sponger ?
He has these intense relationships with other men that were also perplexing. He exchanges letters and is in love with this one and that one. So why are they separated ? I suspect that the ‘love’ is not necessarily sexual or romantic, but how the Greeks express strong friendship (?).
I found the book to be rather boring until about the middle. I was not interested in Crete, though the descriptions of nature were beautiful. When the mine collapsed, I was sad that it didn’t end the book. I had just about worked myself into quitting (I am a completist).
Suddenly everything changed. I thought I didn’t care for the characters or the story, and wasn’t interested in Crete. Huh, that didn’t sound right (the part about Crete – love to travel by book and in real life). I had put the book down, but it had started to whisper to me.
I kept thinking of the evocative descriptions and the narrative. It had gotten under my skin. I took another look at the story so far and realized that Zorba had faults, but he was loyal, hard working, and a true friend to the Narrator. He also had moments of kindness and valor that showed he could rise to the occasion. He changed in my mind from worthless to someone like one of those big dogs that mean well, but destroy everything (wasted Narrator’s money on a woman; his creation was a disaster; he turned the monk’s mind to arson).
I also got to know the Narrator more and through his musings, he became more interesting to me – though not any clearer as to his goals and methods.
Finally the longer they were there the more the villagers were exposed. You got to see their hardness, and insularity, the suspicion, and hatred of those who were outsiders or different. The horrible disrespect they had when Boboulina died, and the murder of the young widow showed how different they were from Zorba and the Narrator. The casual violence of their lives showed when the monk tried to roast the monastery with the monks in it.
I was sad when they parted, and was glad to have news from Zorba and the Narrator after their time in Crete. It was sad when Zorba died. Again with the Narrator it was unclear what he was doing and why - in the real world. Philosophically he spent the book trying to be what he wasn’t: a man of action. He was a man of thought and words, and felt it was not a worthy mode of living. He wanted to be a man of action, but never figured out how to be, even with Zorba to show him the way. It wasn’t in his nature.
Zorba was a force of nature and lived each minute to the fullest. He didn’t plan or calculate he just experienced. Sometimes he was kind and thought of others, and sometimes he thought only of himself and his enjoyment.
While both ideas of life have value, I think being all one type is not really a recipe for happiness or a full life. The Narrator never thought he was good enough, and Zorba was too restless to settle and enjoy a stable life (until the end).
So in the end I enjoyed it and it will stay with me for a while. I had seen parts of the movie but couldn’t stand to watch much of it. Perhaps after enjoying the book, I will change my mind. The great thing about reading is it opens your mind and changes attitudes if you let it. I almost didn’t, but was able to in the end. Besides the story, I will always think fondly of Zorba for that.
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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.”
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
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 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!
The narrator
Yep, that's the interpretation we are supposed to have. Instead, I saw an old man who had his own set of morals (not particularly nice ones) who only owns up to his responsibilities when absolutely forced to.
It appears Zorba is supposed to be a role model for the narrator – a role model who can help the narrator get out of his shell. Instead, Zorba is a teacher with a poor life lesson to tell. That lesson would be fine if it was just "grab life and make the most of it". But there is something more to Zorba's lesson. In grabbing life, it is as if he has forgotten he is grabbing it from fellow human beings. Zorba is not a particularly nice person, and for him to be idolized (as he is in this book) is wrong.
Maybe I missed a level in all this. Maybe everything I've said above was the real point. But I don't believe that to be true.
I did not like the character of Zorba. I did not like what he preached. I did not like what he did. And I cannot find forgiveness for the character.
Accordingly, I cannot find forgiveness or anything of value with the book.
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 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.
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.””
"The aim of man and matter is to create joy, according to Zorba" (p. 272)
Contrast the man of action, who creates joy as he lives life with the man of thought who ponders the meaning of life and carries the works of Dante in his pocket...
Nikos Kazantzakis gives us these two men
Kazantzakis' Zorba the Greek is a life-affirming novel of ideas. It presents insightful observations on both the nature of man and the real, and the ideal approaches to life. The contrast between the Apollonian and Dionysian spirits of the primary characters highlights this vibrant story of life and love.
What I really experienced in reading this book was great desire to be in Crete instead of Minnesota. Especially this winter.
The story is hard to follow, what there is of it. A nameless narrator appears to be a reformed communist going into a mining venture to become a caring capitalist. After saying farewell to a dear friend leaving for the revolution in Russia, the narrator meets the free spirit Zorba, who agrees to work on the mine project. The novel after this is mostly conversations and philosophical debates: socialism vs. capitalism, Christianity vs. hedonism, book learning vs. the experience of life. There’s also a lot of stuff about a widow killed by villagers, something involving monks, and an old woman Zorba loves that I never really followed too well. All in all it seems secondary to the Boss learning from Zorba to live his life to the full.
“In the corner was an icon representing the Virgin pressing her cheek against her son’s, her big eyes full of tears.
‘Do you know why she’s crying, boss?’
‘No.’
‘Because she can see what’s going on. If I was a painter of icons, I’d draw the Virgin without eyes, ears or nose. Because I’d be sorry for her.’” – p. 201
This was a really
A thought-provoker...
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
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 female character and she only talks about men. But it doesn't matter, because she is a whore.
This was a really
A thought-provoker...