Inspiring Older Readers

posted on 12 Nov 2018

Zorba the Greek by Nikos Kazantzakis

I really didn’t know what to expect when I finally got around to picking this book up – it’s been on my shelves for such a long time without being read that it had almost become invisible. I had, of course, heard of it – it sold quite well back as a Faber paperback in the Seventies when I worked in a bookshop and I also knew there was a film starring Anthony Quinn (which I’ve also never seen) – but beyond that, nothing really.

To be honest, I did look up a couple of reviews from the broadsheets just to get a sense of what I might be going into and they seemed pretty positive. But having come out the other end, I’m not at all sure why.

The action of this book is entirely secondary to what I take to be its underlying philosophy of life. A youngish, academically inclined man struggles to come to terms with the disparity he feels between the life of the mind and a life of decisive physical action. A very close friend of his has left to join a war being fought in the Caucasus and, in an attempt to link himself more fully to the peasant working class he wants to admire, he takes out rights on the mining of lignite coal in Crete.

He teams up early on with a man who approaches him for work – and it turns out to be a relationship that changes both of their lives. The man is Alexis Zorba and he’s the embodiment of an irresistible life-force – he plays music, he womanises, he understands nature; in short, he lives every moment as if it were his last and in a state of questionable morality.

Meanwhile, the younger man who we only know as ‘boss’ continues to struggle with his internal conflict and seeks resolution in the writing of a book about Buddhism. Eventually however he succumbs to the call of the flesh and seduces a local widow – with terrible consequences. In a rather extraordinary passage she is rounded on by local men for her immorality, firstly being stoned and then decapitated despite the best efforts of Zorba to prevent the atrocity.

In the end Zorba and the boss go their different ways and the boss learns that his friend has been killed in the war he went off to fight in – the message being that you have to live your life true to your natural spirit.

The novel (chunks of which are heavily autobiographical as I understand it ) is frequently praised for the depiction of Zorba and the infusion of raw life spirit he gives to the book. Personally, I found him unspeakably irritating and had I been forced to spend any extended length of time in his company, I too might have been convinced to forego the life of the intellect in order to beat him over the head with any handy length of wood that was available.

The book also had a strangely flat tone to it – the hedonistic highs were never very high and the extraordinary, brutal killing of the widow seems to merit little more drama than that attributed to a problem with the mining operation. There seems to be a fundamental misogyny at the heart of this book that became increasingly difficult to stomach. The humiliating portrayal of the local, elderly prostitute,  Madame Hortense, who takes them in when they first arrive and who Zorba flirts with and seduces, is really hard to reconcile to.

I think, however, these difficulties of tone and nuance may spring from the translation - it has a very odd pedigree. The edition I read was what you might call the standard translation by Carl Wildman but I gather that a new, much better one is now available. Writing in 2015 on the Complete Review website, M.A.Orthofer says:

“Despite the fame of Zorba the Greek -- in no small part thanks to the 1964 film-adaptation -- for more than half a century the novel was only available in English in Carl Wildman's translation -- problematic because, as Peter Bien explains in the Introduction to his new (2014) translation:

‘The earlier translation was made by someone who did not know Greek and who worked from a previous translation into French.’

 Bien notes: "omissions sometimes of many sentences, obvious errors, even commissions" (material not in the original) in the previous translation, and offers what one would have hoped for from the start: a complete translation of and from the original, rather than a Zorba the Greek refracted through a French lens. “

 

So maybe my puzzlement at why this book has such an elevated reputation could be resolved by a new translation – but I somehow doubt it. Whether you like this book is really going to hinge on just how much you like Zorba as a character.

I didn’t……I really, really didn’t.

 

Terry Potter

November 2018