Author: Nikos Kazantzakis
Genre: Historical fiction
Originally Published: 1952
Synopsis:
In elegant, thoughtful prose Nikos Kazantzakis, one of the greats of modern literature, follows this Jesus as he struggles to live out God’s will for him, powerfully suggesting that it was Christ’s ultimate triumph over his flawed humanity, when he gave up the temptation to run from the cross and willingly laid down his life for mankind, that truly made him the venerable redeemer of men.
Nikos Kazantzakis retelling of the story of the Gospels is as literarily beautiful as it is captivating. I struggle to write a review for such a profound book, but my soul remains dissatisfied until I at least try to put into words the brilliance of this book. This review shall be broken into two parts, just like Jesus's struggle with the duality of man and God in the book. The first part shall be a literary analysis, the second a spiritual one.
Despite, in it's essence being a Judaeo-Christian narrative, the brilliant Greek touch of the author is profoundly felt in every paragraph. Every sentence seems to have been carefully thought out, every simile carefully measured, and every metaphor carefully placed. Nikos' comparisons have power. In its essence, I can coin the entirety of this work as Anti-Prosaic. The most simple concepts of, for example, a rising sun, is given such a beautiful metaphorical twist, that the reader is left bewildered by the genius. To call Nikos a writer would be disservice - he is a painter of words. The layman may feel his use of metaphors and symbolisms to be over abundant, perhaps even unnecessary, but to take away even one beautiful passage would be to limit the great mind, the great voice of a generation of Greek authors - authors who play with such a complex language with such a wide vocabulary base. In its over application of metaphor and simile, we see the technicality of the author and his mastery of the complex language. Of course, some of the brilliance is lost in translation, but that is a small price to pay for the modern reader to experience this retelling.
Just a few examples I highlighted while reading:
"He looked as though someone had forgotten to add the yeast when he was kneaded."
"Time, within him, had become as small as a heartbeat, as large as death."
"Time ran on like immortal water, and irrigated the world."
To touch on the spiritual aspect of the book, I can only look into my own heart, and my own struggles with spirituality.
Spirituality - a word overused to the point of cliché - hijacked by phonies and charlatans. Nikos carries his pen and strikes the matter right at it's eternal heart; by closely examining this struggle in the eternal figure of the struggle itself - Jesus Christ. In this book, we find Christ constantly struggle with temptations of flesh, and his battle to ascend to spirit. In the footprints of Christs journey in the book, we find our own soul laid bear, our own inadequacies revealed. Each and every one of us struggles every day to fulfill our 'Spirit', each and every one of us, because we are not the Son of God, fails. But the beauty of this book is that, even up to the very end, we are not sure that Christ himself will succeed in this struggle. We are shown a doubting, faltering, questioning Christ, we are shown non-to-wise disciples and over-zeolous Rabbis. We see a Christ whose message transmogrify as his journey through the Gospels progresses. The ultimate truth is perhaps never found, and to give it away here, would be to do the reader a dear disservice of not letting them find out for themselves.
"This book was written because I wanted to offer a supreme model to the man who struggles; I wanted to show him that he must not fear pain, temptation or death - because all three can be conquered, all three have already been conquered."
So Nikos writes in his prologue - and indeed, every man who struggles can take away words of wisdom from Nikos's Christ. In the end, as long as we struggle upwards, as long as we forage ahead without fear, eventually, we will be unified with God.
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