Word: odyssey
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CHILD OF OUR TIME, by Michel del Castillo. A harrowing, terribly unsophisticated testimony to man's capacity for inhumanity, and a minor masterpiece of its kind. Written as a novel, it reads more like the bitter, autobiographical odyssey of the boy who, at three, saw corpses on the streets of Madrid, experienced the concentration camp's life-in-death during the '30s and '40s, survived the indifference of his own parents, and could still perceive the good in life...
...Odyssey: A Modern Sequel, by Nikos Kazantzakis, translated by Kimon Friar. Only a very bold poet would have dared to pick up where Homer left off. Greece's late Nikos Kazantzakis did it in a vast, soaring poem in which high adventure, brutality and erotic appetites are finally subordinated to a search for self-knowledge...
Beyond the Pagan World. The Odyssey: A Modern Sequel is a huge repository of bloody adventure, eroticism, brutal sights and sounds, magnificent descriptions of the earth, sea and sky and all their wonders. Man's coarsest appetites and his noblest aspirations exist side by side in Odysseus, and he is as ready to seduce a simple girl by pretending to be a god as he is to admit his doubts about himself and the human condition...
...knew. He confronts him with characters reminiscent of Buddha, Christ, Faust and Don Quixote so that Odysseus can try his own view of God and man against theirs. He agrees with none of them, thus underscoring Kazantzakis' belief that each man must make his own spiritual odyssey; no one else can make it for him, no ready-made belief can serve for each individual. The search is one for freedom-freedom from the demands of Odysseus' heart and mind. Kazantzakis seems to say: not until Odysseus is delivered from doubt, fear and even hope can he reach anything...
...twelve years to produce a book of singular power and beauty. Translator Kimon Friar, a poet and scholar of Greek descent, received from Kazantzakis himself the ultimate praise: that the translation was as good as the original. Whether or not that is so, as it now reads, The Odyssey is by all odds the most impressive literary achievement of many a year. It bears out the feeling Kazantzakis once expressed, in describing a form of spiritual conversion he underwent during a solitary retreat in the mountains: "Since then I have felt ashamed to commit any vulgar...