Tomichan Matheikal's blog

There are some books which are unputdownable, yet they compel you to put them down in order to contemplate.  Every page is a bewitching invitation to turn over to the next.  Every line captures your fancy and you don’t want to leave the intoxication.  Yet your mind urges you to stop and take in a line here or a metaphor there more deeply.  One of the many books which did that to me (and will do it again when I read it again) is Zorba the Greek by Nikos Kazantzakis. There is very little by way of plot in this novel.  There is the first person narrator who would rather choose a book on love than a beautiful woman who offers the experience of love to him.  Then there’s Zorba, the protagonist, who is a sixty year-old man with boundless passion for life.  He thinks that a woman sleeping alone is “a shame on all men.”  The intensity of Zorba’s passion for life can seduce women, notwithstanding his age.  He is a lover, fighter, adventurer, ...

Happiness is as simple as “a glass of wine, a roast chestnut, a wretched little brazier, the sound of the sea.”  The Buddha is not required for arriving at enlightenment.  In fact, the kind of enlightenment brought by the Buddha can be anti-life.  The Buddha can be a demon within.   Zorba is the antithesis of the Buddha.  Zorba is the protagonist of Nikos Kazantzakis’s classical novel, Zorba the Greek .  The narrator of the novel is a young intellectual who has decided to bid goodbye to books for a while and take up active life.  He wants to be with people.  Zorba, an elderly man with boundless and unconstrained passion for life, becomes the narrator’s companion.  No, not just companion but his Buddha. A scene from the movie Zorba the Greek However, the kind of enlightenment that Zorba brings differs totally from what the Buddha had brought.  If life was “sorrow” for the Buddha, it is “trouble” for Zorba.  The h...

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...