Product Description

Set before the start of the First World War, this moving fable sees a young English writer set out to Crete to claim a small inheritance. But when he arrives, he meets Alexis Zorba, a middle-aged Greek man with a zest for life. Zorba has had a family and many lovers, has fought in the Balkan wars, has lived and loved - he is a simple but deep man who lives every moment fully and without shame. As their friendship develops, the Englishman is gradually won over, transformed and inspired along with the reader.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #89940 in Books
• Published on: 2008-10-16
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 352 pages

About the Author
Nikos Kazantzakis was born in 1883 in Herakleion on the island of Crete. During the Cretan revolt of 1897 his family was sent to the island of Naxos, where he attended the French School of the Holy Cross. From 1902 to 1906 he studied law at Athens University. He worked first as a journalist and throughout a long career wrote several plays, travel journals and translations. His remarkable travels began in 1907 and there were few countries in Europe or Asia that he didn't visit. He studied Buddhism in Vienna and later belonged to a group of radical intellectuals in Berlin, where he began his great epic The Odyssey, which he completed in 1938. He didn't start writing novels until he was almost 60 and completed his most famous work, Zorba the Greek, in 1946. Other novels include Freedom and Death (1953) and The Last Temptation (1954), which the Vatican placed on the Index. Return to Greco, an autobiographical novel, was published in 1961.Nikos Kazantzakis finally settled in Antibes with his second wife, and died there from leukaemia in October 1957. He is buried at Herakleion, where the epitaph on his tomb reads: 'I hope for nothing. I fear nothing. I am free'.

Customer Reviews

This Book challenges you to open your Eyes
I haven't read a good fiction book in a long time... but this book demanded attention. It brought me back to my senses, after being swept away by philosophical meanderings for so long. This book is a teacher, it teaches you that life is to be lived, really, truly and completely and not just to be thought about and thrown away.

If you read one book in the next year, make this it!

Read it once - read it again!
Probably one of the first novels I have read a long time ago, which gave me a deep insight into life and the we way we live it, namely wrongly!

Just as Kazantzakis intended that character, Zorba steps out of the book, knocks you about a bit, questions your answers and teaches you a bit about life. About sadness and happines, cruelty and kindness, about a life not always lived the right way, but surely a life lived intensly!

You will dread the moment of the last page, you will not want Zorba to leave, but at the end you will walk out there in the old world seeing it with new eyes and try to be: Zorba - the Greek!
J.

An underrated classic!
"Zorba the Greek" is simply a great novel. Kazantzakis is brilliant in his dialogue, story-telling, and word pictures. I have read Zorba over and over again, particularly when I want to feel the vibrant life of Greek culture. Many find themselves in opposition to Kazantzakis' philosophies, but this book should be savored for its pure celebration of life, brilliantly embodied in Zorba and his intellectual friend, a young British Greek.

Sexist, yes. Anti-religious, yes. A great read, nonetheless!