Dave's Book Blog: "Zorba the Greek" by Nikos Kazantzakis

Alexis Zorba is a Greek man in his sixties who works for the narrator who is developing a lignite mine on the shore in Crete. The narrator is bookish and studying the Buddha while Zorba is a wine-swilling, souvlaki-eating, widow-bedding rascal. Other characters are peripheral to this fundamental matching of the Apollonian with the Dionysian.

There's not much of a plot. There are a pair of widows, one of whom becomes Zorba's mistress for a time. The other becomes involved in the principal tragedy. Mineshafts get dug and Zorba plans and constructs a way of transporting the coal. Not much of a plot, and yet it is perfectly paced with the key turning points coming almost exactly on the 25%, 50% and 75% marks. But the plot really isn't the point. Instead, this mismatched pair debate life and death, and love; they drink, they eat, and they dance.

And it's magic.

As well as the author, I would like to applaud the translator of my version who was Carl Wildman.

Warning: Seen through modern eyes, this book, and Zorba himself, are hugely misogynistic. Women are regarded as mysterious other beings who want above all else to be tupped by a man. They are very much relegated to the status of objects.

Selected quotes:

"'This world's a life-sentence,' said a man with a moustache who had picked up his philosophy from the Karagiozis theatre. 'Yes, a life-sentence. Be damned to it.'" (Ch 1)
"His face was furrowed, weather-beaten, like worm-eaten wood." (Ch 1)
"The sea, autumn mildness, islands bathed in light, fine rain spreading a diaphanous veil over the immortal nakedness of Greece. Happy is the man, I thought, who, before dying, has the good fortune to sail the Aegean Sea." (Ch 2)
"Many are the joys of this world - women, fruit, ideas. But to cleave that sea in the gentle autumnal season, murmuring the name of each islet, is to my mind the joy most apt to transport the heart of man into paradise. Nowhere else can one pass so easily and serenely from reality to dream. The frontiers dwindle, and from the masts of the most ancient ships spring branches and fruits. It is as if here in Greece necessity is the mother of miracles." (Ch 2)
"What sort of madness comes over us to make us throw ourselves on another man, when he's done nothing to us, and bite him, cut his nose off, tear his ear out, run him through the guts - and all the time, calling on the Almighty to help us! Does it mean we want the Almighty to go and cut off noses and ears and rip people up?" (Ch 2)
"How does a plant sprout and grow into a flower on manure and muck? Say to yourself, Zorba, that the manure and muck is man and the flower liberty." (Ch 2)
"A youth, sunburnt and bare-foot, appeared .at the water's edge singing love-songs. Maybe he understood the pain they expressed, for his voice had begun to grow hoarse, like that of a cockerel." (Ch 3)
"For hundreds of years, Dante's verses have been sung in the poet's country. And just as love songs prepare boys and girls for love, so the ardent Florentine verses prepared Italian youths for the day of deliverance." (Ch 3)
"one day I had gone to a little village. An old grandfather of ninety was busy planting an almond tree. "What, grandad!" 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?'" (Ch 3)
"'It's the old birds who make the best stew,' he said, licking his lips." (Ch 3)
"Things we are accustomed to, and which we pass by indifferently, suddenly rise up in front of Zorba like fearful enigmas." (Ch 4)
"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. I see with these eyes, I hear with these ears, I digest with these guts. All the rest are ghosts, I tell you. When I die, everything'll die. The whole Zorbatic world will go to the bottom!" (Ch 4) Wonderfully solipsistic!
"I at last realised that eating was a spiritual function and that meat, bread and wine were the raw materials from which the mind is made." (Ch 6)
"The crow ... used to walk respectably, properly -well, like a crow. But one day he got it into his head to try and strut about like a pigeon. And from that time on the poor fellow couldn't for the life of him recall his own way of walking. He was all mixed up, don't you see? He just hobbled about.'" (Ch 6)
"But I do declare, the older I get the wilder I become! Don't let any one tell me old age steadies a man! Nor that when he sees death coming he stretches out his neck and says: Cut off my head, please, so that I can go to heaven! The longer I live, the more I rebel. I'm not going to give in; I want to conquer the world!" (Ch 6) That's just how I feel! Liberated by retirement and a pension from drudgery, but acutely aware of the clock ticking, I want to live, live, live!
"We were deeply aware, each of us in our own way, that we were two ephemeral little insects, clinging tightly to the terrestrial bark, that we had found a convenient corner near the sea, behind some bamboos, planks and empty petrol-cans, where we hung together" (Ch 7)
"Every village has its simpleton, and if one does not exist they invent one to pass the time." (Ch 8)
"haven't I come out of a sewer, like everyone else? ... from a mother's innards." (Ch 8)
"'Life is trouble,' Zorba continued. 'Death, no. To live - do you know what that means? To undo your belt and look for trouble!'" (Ch 8)
"My life had got on the wrong track, and my contact with men had become now a mere soliloquy." (Ch 8)
"You can knock for ever on a deaf man's door!" (Ch 8)
"I think of God as being exactly like me. Only bigger, stronger, crazier. And immortal, into the bargain." (Ch 9)
"Tell me what you do with what you eat and I will tell you who you are!" (Ch 10)
"Every one follows his own bent. Man is like a tree. You've never quarrelled with a fig tree because it doesn't bear cherries, have you?" (Ch 10)
"Don't go picking things over with a needle! ... If you take a magnifying-glass and look at your drinking water - an engineer told me this, one day - you'll see, he said, the water's full of little worms you couldn't see with your naked eye. You'll see the worms and you won't drink. You won't drink and you'll curl up with thirst. Smash your glass, boss, and the little worms'll vanish and you can drink and be refreshed!" (Ch 10)
"Man's heart is a ditch full of blood." (Ch 10)
"Seeing as how I have no time-limit clause in my contract with life, I let the brakes off when I get to the most dangerous slopes. The life of man is a road with steep rises and dips. All sensible people use their brakes. But - and this is where, boss, maybe I show what I'm made of -1 did away with my brakes altogether a long time ago, because I'm not at all scared of a jolt." (Ch 13)
"Every man has his folly, but the greatest folly of all, in my view, is not to have one." (Ch 13)
"Time had taken on a new savour in Zorba's company. It was no longer an arithmetical succession of events without, nor an insoluble philosophical problem within. It was warm sand, finely sieved, and I felt it running gently through my fingers." (Ch 13)
"don't listen to the old. If the world did heed them, it would rush headlong to its destruction." (Ch 14)
"A bit of earth that was hungry ... and laughed ... and kissed. A lump of mud that wept human tears." (Ch 23)
"But what of revolt? The proud quixotic reaction of mankind to conquer Necessity and make external laws of the soul, to deny all that is and create a new world according to the laws of one's heart, which are contrary to the inhuman law of nature." (Ch 24)
"Does our unquenchable desire for immortality spring, not from the fact that we are immortal, but from the fact that during the short span of our life we are in the service of something immortal?" (Ch 24)
"I've stopped thinking all the time of what happened yesterday. And stopped asking myself what's going to happen tomorrow." (Ch 24)
"Luck is blind, they say. It can't see where it's going and keeps running into people ... and the people it knocks into we call lucky!" (Ch 25)
"Sometimes the earth becomes transparent and we see our ultimate ruler, the grub, working night and day in his underground workshops. But we quickly turn our eyes away, because man can endure everything except the sight of that small white maggot." (Ch 25)