'Zorba The Greek'

Nikos Kazantzakis wrote Zorba the Greek based on his real-life experiences with minor George Zorbas. No real word if the man was anything like the literary character, but we must assume as much. We do know that Zorbas was a spiritual man becoming a monk, which is how he met Kazantzakis.

Religion, faith and spirituality are the major themes to Zorba the Greek: “The boss” being an academic who is coaxed into this listless, carnal way of life by the free-wheeling Zorba, the man who’s seen too much death and war to put value into the faith of a God or gods. Even the struggle within the narrator is great although you get the feeling that the complexities of life – and even the small moments of gracious humanity – make a higher power a definite likelihood. If that makes sense.

I found myself thinking a lot about Jack Kerouac and his work while reading this. He himself a spiritual person, seeking some sort of satori or nirvana through life (drugs, women, poetry) not unlike Zorba who found it through women, food and music. And perhaps a hard day of work. Zorba the Greek was published in English in 1952, five years before Kerouac would publish On The Road, which is just the American version.

I wonder too how Kazantzakis’ home country of Greece and its current place in history affected his writing and even his personal thoughts on God or religion. In his time, there had been three prominent holocausts, one of which included his Greek brothers in the Ottoman Empire, a regime which also took its toll on the Armenians. Meanwhile, the word “genocide” hadn’t even been coined until Adolf Hitler gained power and began his pogroms against the Jewish population of Europe.

I would imagine the idea of God would be hard to comprehend under those circumstances.