One of my favourites, Zorba the Greek, author Nikos Kazantza.The classic movie starring Anthony Quinn was based upon this book. As the story goes, Alexis Zorba is an old Greek workman who accompanies the narrator, a bookish philosopher, to Crete to exploit a mine he owns there. Zorba is a figure created on a huge scale: his years have not dimmed the flame by which he lives, the gusto with which he responds to all that life offers him, whether he is organizing the work at the mine, coping with mad monks in a mountain monastery, embellishing the endless tale of his past adventures, or making love to Dame Hortense. Nikos Kazantzakis is one of the most distinguished and individual of modern Greek writers, and in Zorba the Greek he has written a book that lives by a vitality and rhythm that seems to owe little or nothing to the contemporary traditions of the Western novel. It is bursting with wit, fantasy, and enjoyment of life, and at the same time has a continual undertone of serious philosophical reflection. Zorba the Greek is Rabelaisian, a Don Quixote in which the role of the knight and Sancho Panza are reversed, plus a distinct Arabian Nights touch. About the Author Nikos Kazantzakis was born in Crete in 1885. He studied at the University of Athens where he received his Doctor of Laws degree, later in Paris under the philosopher Henri Bergson, and completed his studies in literature and art during four other years spent in Germany and Italy. Also author of The Last Temptation of Christ and Saint Francis, not to mention one of the best spiritual autobiographies I have ever read, Report to Greco.
Posted on: Sat, 18 Oct 2014 08:06:06 +0000
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