Tomichan Matheikal's blog

My favourite novelists are those whose characters went on some wild goose chases, looking for oases in the mirage of life.  Albert Camus, Franz Kafka, and Dostoevsky have remained on the top of my list for long.  Jose Saramago’s The Gospel according to Jesus Christ and Javier Marias’s Infatuations captured my fancy later.  But one writer who has remained above them all for long is Nikos Kazantzakis.  His novels explore the conflict between the body and the soul, between “god and man” as he put it.  The Last Temptation of Christ, Christ Recrucified , and Saint Francis explore that conflict brilliantly.  However, the author’s earlier novel, Zorba the Greek , is what strikes me as the best.  Kazantzakis Zorba presents the classical Greek dichotomy between the Apollonian and the Dionysian.  Apollo is the god of reason and control, while Dionysius revels in the wild passions.  In the novel, Zorba is a worker who is taken on as an as...

The basic theme of Kazantzakis’s novel, The Last Temptation of Christ , is the conflict between the body and the soul or, in the words of the novelist himself, “the struggle between God and man.” “A weak soul does not have the endurance to resist the flesh for very long,” says Kazantzakis in the Preface.  “It grows heavy, becomes flesh itself, and the contest ends.  But among responsible men… the conflict between flesh and spirit breaks out mercilessly and may last until death.” (emphasis added) Kazantzakis explored this theme with slight variations in many novels.  In The Last Temptation , Jesus overcomes the temptations of the flesh by courting death.  In Saint Francis , the eponymous protagonist overcomes his fleshly desires through rigorous mortification.  Zorba, in Zorba the Greek , subscribes to a unique version of the Buddhist middle path by blending the body and the soul in his own pragmatic way. “God and devil are one and the same thi...