Word: cretans
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Report to Greco details the major events of Nikos Kazantzakis's life: his childhood on a farm in a Cretan village and at a school run by Franciscan monks, his years at the University of Athens, his journey to the monasteries on Mt. Athos in Macetonia. But the book concentrates on his intellectual and spiritual pilgrimages. For, as Kazantzakis emphasizes in his introduction...
...Herzog? For one thing, he achieves nobility by immersing himself in a noble tradition. The Consul in Under the Volcano, for example, may be one of the many examples of a man "alienated" from society but the hero of Report to Greco is a descendant of generations of proud Cretans and a son of the ancient island of Crete. It is no accident that the author begins the prologue with Cretan soil in his hand and ends it by addressing his grand-father...
...place myself soldier-like before the general, and make Report to Greco. For Greco is kneaded from the same Cretan soil as 1, and is able to understand me better than all the strivers of past and present...
...rinds are not missed, as the reader scrambles after the climber. There is the terrified Cretan youth, commanded by his father to kiss the feet of countrymen garroted by the Turks; the student in Paris, inflamed and impelled by Nietzsche's visions of the Superman; the pilgrim searching vainly for the future in Soviet Russia, for the past in Jerusalem, for the present in the clouds brooding over his native Crete...
...whole thing was just a bit much for Eleni Kazantzakis, however. Widow of Nikos Kazantzakis, author of the book on which the movie is based, she angrily responded: "Greeks resent being told that 60 years ago in a Cretan village simple peasants behaved inelegantly toward a dead woman. They forget my dead husband, whose tombstone in Crete was covered with excrement every day for years...