Will I love Zorba the Greek?

This book doesn’t allow for any preparation—it bites you right away! The beauty of it lies in how Kazantzakis deals with human experiences from moment to moment. He shows us how to live in the moment. For instance, in the end, Zorba and his friend have lost all their money, but Zorba says, “Let’s dance.”

They aren’t defeated but go on to the next experience. It touched me to see how they could live in the now, for life is rich.

I love this tale narrated by a young academic who teams up with an exuberant, older working man named Zorba, “a passionate lover of wine, women and song” ...and dance. The younger man is more of a staid introvert. They are in a village in Crete to develop a mine. Their interactions are both amusing and philosophical. This contrasts with one horrific event where the appalled narrator struggles to understand the village’s moral codes which conflict with his own. In the final scene as he comes out of his shell, he asks Zorba to teach him to dance.

This is… show more.

In my own novel, Once We Were Here, I wrote in a passage towards the beginning that “Greeks have a word for everything.” And while that might be true, the second part of it is that the words we have can often be impossible to translate because a single Greek word can mean so many things, all at once. Kefi is one such word, and rather than try to effectively sum up something that has no direct English equivalent, the best thing to do is recommend this book, as kefi is something the infamous title character Zorba possesses in… show more.