Book Review: Zorba the Greek by Nikos Kazantzakis
I haven’t read Zorba the Greek since I was a young man in the late 1960s. It wasn’t as influential for my intellectual journey as Tropic of Cancer by Henry Miller, On the Road by Jack Kerouac, or Walden by Henry David Thoreau, but it was one of the works that helped give me a kick in the pants to get out and do something with my life. The occasion for this second look at Alexis Zorba is a fairly new translation of the Greek classic by Peter Bien. According to the translator’s introduction, this version is raunchier and more precise than the one that appeared decades ago: he has retained various expletives that the original translator left out, and in addition, he has worked from the original Greek, unlike the previous translation which was done from a French rendering, not from Greek. This has allowed Bien, as he explains, to go over problematic words and more precisely turn them into English.
Even though it was adapted from French rather than Greek, the original translation of Zorba the Greek became a worldwide phenomenon when it appeared in the early 1950s and was made even more famous by the 1964 Oscar-winning film starring Anthony Quinn. In the film, Alan Bates, an Englishman, plays the book’s narrator, but in the book the narrator is from the island of Crete, where most of the story takes place, and Zorba is from Macedonia, in northern Greece. The narrator’s voice in the book, in fact, very much reminds me of Kazantzakis himself, whose memoir Report to Greco I read a few years ago.
In short, the narrator is a writer who intellectualizes life, while Zorba is a laborer and a womanizer who revels in every moment of his flamboyant existence. When they meet in Piraeus, the port of Athens, the narrator, seemingly on a whim, decides to take Zorba along to southern Crete to help him open a lignite mine. They become good friends, and the narrator absorbs much of Zorba’s freewheeling philosophy as they eat, drink, meet women, and interact with the local villagers.
Kazantzakis is a very talented writer; his descriptions often become poetic as he, through the narrator, comments on the simple beauties and joys of life. Zorba’s moods, on the other hand, shift from pensive to bombastic from one moment to the next. The narrator is obviously envious of Zorba’s childlike, constantly amazed outlook on life, but at the same time he is unwilling to completely forsake his books and writings to adopt this lifestyle for himself. By modern standards, many of Zorba’s outbursts concerning women are blatantly misogynistic; however, I think it is important to take the story in its historical and geographical context. The culture and societal structures of Crete (and of Greece in general) shortly after the end of World War I, when the story takes place, were vastly different than that of the modern era, and readers need to keep this in mind. It reminds me of the boxed set of Looney Tunes cartoons that one of my sons recently gave me. In some of the discs, Whoopi Goldberg comes on to explain that some of the portraitures in Looney Tunes depict racial minorities in ways that today are considered wrong, but to censure or erase these cartoons would be the same as saying that these wrong viewpoints never existed. So: content warning. It’s the same with Zorba the Greek. Some of the things Zorba says are wrong by any standards, but that’s how some people thought and spoke back then, and thus it is portrayed by Kazantzakis in the book.
Would I recommend the book? It depends on whether you can handle the raunchiness and violence. It didn’t affect me personally now as hard as it did when I was a young man who had not yet stepped out and really lived life to the full. However, it does have its touching moments. As I mentioned above: Kazantzakis is a superb writer with a gift for poetic description. This alone is a good reason to give the book a try.
