Word: greco
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REPORT TO GRECO, by Nikos Kazantzakis. 512 pages. Simon & Schuster...
Unready Draft. Kazantzakis died eight years ago at 74. His heirs have spent the intervening years extending his legend with carefully doled out translations of unpublished texts. Report to Greco-is the latest entry in the lengthy procession, which is by no means over: his widow Helen and his friend Kimon Friar, who spent four years translating Kazantzakis' Odyssey, are both engaged in writing biographies. Neither can do the man, or the legend, more service than this awkward, graceless but powerful personal testament...
Peaks & Rinds. But mountaintops were Kazantzakis' habitat. He liked the ascent; it was to him the essential and never ending purpose of life. "We ascended," he writes in an epilogue addressed to Greco, "because the very act of ascending, for us, was happiness, salvation, and paradise." He preferred rarefied air and the panoramic view. "Rinds they were," he says, contemptuously discarding the "details of daily life...
Report to Greco illuminates Kazantzakis' life in the way that lightning illuminates the dark. A sudden flash, and there stands that lusty old goat Zorba, the flesh-and-blood model for Kazantzakis' most successful novel, who taught him "to love life and have no fear of death." Another flash reveals the writer in the throes of creation, dipping his pen into his own blood: "Writing may have been a game in other ages. Today it is a grave duty, to proclaim a state of mobilization, to urge men to do their utmost to surpass the beast...
...this is a ship of fools." Wading through heavy condensations of Miss Porter's prose, his fellow travelers check in to introduce themselves: the troubled and tire some young American lovers (Elizabeth Ashley, George Segal), a band of down-at-the-heel flamenco dancers led by Jose Greco, an anti-Semitic Nazi publisher (Jose Ferrer), a gentle Jewish salesman (Germany's Heinz Ruehmann) who can believe no evil of a nation that produced Goethe, Beethoven and Bach. Muses the worldly-wise ship's doctor (Germany's Oskar Werner) with deadly accuracy: "I've seen...