Word: zorba
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Nikos Kazantzakis, 68, was runner-up for the Nobel Prize in Literature last year.* Born in Crete and author of some 30 novels, plays and books on philosophy, Kazantzakis is one of Greece's leading men of letters. When Zorba the Greek appeared in Britain seven months ago, British critics tossed cheers around like "well dones" at a cricket match. Said the Times Literary Supplement: "Mr. Kazantzakis . . . has created in Zorba one of the great characters of modern fiction." Said the New Statesman & Nation: "A minor classic." But the British still found it a bit puzzling. Observed the Observer...
...Zorba the Greek resists easy definition. Like the Odyssey and Don Quixote, it is nearly plotless but never pointless. Like the heroes of those fictional sagas, its hero, Alexis Zorba, casts a larger shadow on the world than the world does...
Bouncing Grandpa. Who is Zorba? He is Everyman with a Greek accent. He is Sinbad crossed with Sancho Panza. He is the Shavian Life Force poured into a long, lean, fierce-mustached Greek whose 65 years in the Mediterranean sun have neither dimmed his hawk eyes nor dulled his pagan laughter. From the moment when he pounces on the nameless narrator of the story with an abrupt offer-"Taking me with you? ... I can make soups you've never heard or thought of"-Zorba makes the heroes of most modern fiction seem like dyspeptic ghosts...
...narrator, who becomes Zorba's boss and foil, is a 35-year-old scholar, tired, bookworm-eaten, a 20th century Hamlet. Sensing that he ought to get away from his study for a while, he eases off on his definitive life of Buddha and tries to run a lignite mine. Zorba, the would-be cook, becomes his chief engineer. And through Zorba, the scholar learns to see the world fresh each...
...kicks a stone "downhill, Zorba turns to the scholar and asks: "Boss, did you see that? On slopes, stones come to life again." Sometimes he is a mythmaker: "My grandfather had a white beard and used to wear rubber shoes. One day he leapt from the roof of our house, but when his feet touched the ground he bounced like a ball and bounced up higher than the house, and went higher and higher still till he disappeared in the clouds. That is how my grandfather died...