Word: spain
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...travel journal proves an ideal form for Kazantzakis's vividly descriptive style; his followers will be pleased to find the same sensual imagery which characterizes his other works. The first section conveys the energy of Spain through small details (leaves "glistened on the damp earth like freshly minted gold florins") and longer passages ("the light limped from rock to rock on its way like a wounded bird on its way upward. For a moment, it rested on the peak of the opposite mountain, seemed to pirouette upward, then disappeared. The mute murmur of evening, like the tigress's melody, enveloped...
...book is divided into two sections. In the first Kazantzakis sketches the regions and principal cities of pre-Civil War Spain; at the end of this section, the description of a bull-fight provides a broader view of the Spanish national character. A few years after this trip, the author returned to find Spain torn by civil war, to discover "Madrid, once a charming, carefree, voluptuous princess...in flames." The part recording his second journey is more narrative than descriptive, more concerned with national events than with regional characteristics; nonetheless, Kazantzakis movingly paints the changes in the areas...
Despite his usual craftsmanship, Kazantzakis's style sometimes becomes very hackneyed. Take the passage where he mentions a nightingale and concludes with the wish that "all souls of Spain could find a similar harmony, like this nightingale...
Kazantzakis often follows his descriptive and narrative passages with philosophical analyses. In fact, he be gins his journal with "Spain has two faces. Its one profile, the elongated fiery visage of the Knight of the Woeful Countenance; and its other, the practical, square head of Sancho." Kazantzakis develops this view of the Spanish national character throughout the book; for instance, he writes that Saint Theresa "fruitfully and perfectly fused within herself Don Quixote and Sancho," and calls Unanumo's humor "sanchoesque...
...produces textbooks and school supplies. It controls one company producing TV programs and owns another. It owns a bank. It operates all 1,217 news kiosks in Paris' Métro, railroad stations and airports. And it has branches in Argentina, Belgium, Brazil, Britain, Canada, Egypt, Monaco, Morocco, Spain, Switzerland, Turkey...