The Modern Homer

I recently finished Nikos Kazantzakis’s The Last Temptation of Christ. This may be my read of the year up to this point and my favorite of Kazantzakis’s work. So far, I’ve read five books by Kazantzakis: The Greek Passion, The Saviors of God: Spiritual Exercises, Journeying, Freedom or Death, and now The Last Temptation of Christ. My discovery of The Greek Passion is what inspired me to learn Greek and, eventually, travel to and explore Greece. The story of villagers in Anatolia putting on a Passion play for Easter enthralled me. Kazantzakis’s writing (in English translation, of course) struck a perfect medium for me: grounded in reality enough to satiate my pleasures, but weird and esoteric enough to intrigue me spiritually and keep me off balance. For me, it’s like a stripped down magical realism for lack of better terms.

The Saviors of God was a journey into the really strange. Sometimes I found myself replying to a passage with “What in the world is going on in his head?” This is a question that I’ve found myself asking semi-frequently reading these works. Journeying, to be a collection of travel writing, became just as weird in places. I was completely immersed in the essay set in the Sinai. I remember telling a friend later “it’s like he lives on a different plane.” The most impressive aspect of this is that he doesn’t sacrifice readability to delve into these crevices of spirituality and human experience.

After reading these three, I expected Freedom or Death to be more of the same. To my surprise, though, Freedom or Death was the most grounded of the five books I’ve experienced. Not to say there is no otherworldly aspects in the story, but this novel of a Cretan revolution in the nineteenth century reads very much like historical fiction. There are ghosts that are very real, but you really get a sense of Crete and, most interesting to me, the culture of the Cretans. I told a friend that the Crete of Captain Michalis seems more Egypt than England. The characters of Crete were so real to me I made visceral connections to them. I was angered when the ghost of Michalis’s father was assaulting his granddaughter in-law, constantly enraged by the treatment of women by men and particularly Michalis throughout the novel. This novel gave me the next goal with the Greek language, though. I desire to experience the Cretan dialect in which the novel was written originally. None of it comes through in the translation. Peter A. Bien, the translator of The Last Temptation of Christ, makes a similar point about that book.

The Last Temptation is vying for the top spot in my eyes with Freedom or Death. It’s completely different in some aspects and eerily similar in others. Throughout the narrative I noted how similar the people of Crete and Judea seemed, a point that Bien honed in on in his note. There is also a way in which Kazantzakis makes his protagonist unlikable throughout and by the end your opinion has gradually changed. Michalis and Jesus are both fully fleshed out people, with their positive and negative presented in an unbiased nature. So just like any person, there are aspects of them that you like and dislike. Both novels seem to have some autobiographical qualities to them. That makes sense for someone as philosophical as Kazantzakis, though. The Last Temptation is a little more out there than Freedom or Death, though. That should be expected; Captain Michalis’s struggle is one of this world: achieving freedom for the Ottoman yoke for his homeland of Crete. Jesus’s struggle is more internal and of a spiritual nature by definition. He’s struggling against God in the beginning, Satan at the end, and earthly temptations throughout his life.

I began this with the intention of reviewing The Last Temptation, but I guess that my love of Kazantzakis morphed this into me spilling thoughts on all five books of his that I’ve read so far. I will definitely read more and attempt to read his entire oeuvre. Here’s to more Kazantzakis, Greek literature, and Greece trips!