Some thoughts on Zorba The Greek and First Born of An Ass

Just Some thoughts after a holiday with Zorba The Greek........



I always loved Crete, it's a special place to go and luckily for me I have just had the good fortune to spend eleven days there.

I always keep specific books to read when I go, and this time, amongst others, I brought Nikos Kazantzakis' 'Zorba The Greek'. I had read other pieces by him but somehow I had managed to ignore his most famous work (I know, I know, 'Last Temptation' is pretty famous too) and I'm glad I did. The book was a joy to read. It was full of life and people that even today we don't like to acknowledge or think about. The cruelty and violence and ignorance which is a reality in any newspaper pervades our little societies and we still pretend we've moved on. Damaged and wounded by our inability to look our demons in the eye we need a 'Zorba' to show us a path. Life and action instead of thinking about living our lives 'Someday' . laughter and love and music and play as essential to being free, instead of a side order to a main plate of drudgery and pain. I can't recommend it enough.

Of course all these ideas are the meat and drink of the work of William Joyce. I was constantly reminded of his 'First Born of An Ass' as I read. Both books possess a love of life and a playful curiosity. They both have characters that create world's where they can exist as themselves because no one else is going to do it for them, and both display a constant inventiveness and lightness of touch that mirrors the very nature of our beings given even a glimpse of a chance. Remember the joy of seeing the smile of the first person you fell in love with and tell me that life doesn't value play. Kazantzakis and Joyce value play.

In my opinion it is William who has gone further. The character of 'Zorba' is a man in his sixties while 'Gorm' is still just a child. Joyce pushes the boundaries of his world in an attempt to flex its reality in the face of the utter madness of contemporary society. It is reality's mirror in a similar vain to Gogol's 'Dead Souls' and in many ways just as much a tightrope walk for the Author to complete. I read reviews of 'Zorba' and many of the poor ones spoke of the sexism and violence towards women in it as if the same instances were not prevalent today. Again it is this pretence at an abstract way of living instead of looking the forces of darkness in the eye and getting sweaty for the fight. William is a 'Golden Gloves' champion of this fight. He delivers body blow after body blow in his Poetry and Prose to assumptions that I had never questioned and he has never bowed to the new gods of modern survival.

Nikos Kazantzakis had his fight in his day. I went to visit his tomb in his home city of Heraklion where officially no priest attended his burial ceremony and internment. He was beaten to the Nobel prize in Literature by one vote after the Greek Orthodox Church lobbied against him (Camus won for 'The Stranger') and still holds a strange place in the Greek mind.

William still wages war at 75. His battles don't reflect well on the treatment of Artists in the modern world or our willingness to let someone else pay the price for our own lack of courage. He writes like he fights and he plays, no half measures.

Read 'Zorba The Greek', read 'First Born of An Ass'. You won't regret either of them