Books: Life Force

ZORBA THE GREEK (311 pp.)—NIkos Kazanfzakis—Simon & Schuster ($3.50).

Nikos Kazantzakis, 68, was runner-up for the Nobel Prize in Literature last year.* Born in Crete and author of some 30 novels, plays and books on philosophy, Kazantzakis is one of Greece's leading men of letters. When Zorba the Greek appeared in Britain seven months ago, British critics tossed cheers around like "well dones" at a cricket match. Said the Times Literary Supplement: "Mr. Kazantzakis . . . has created in Zorba one of the great characters of modern fiction." Said the New Statesman & Nation: "A minor classic." But the British still found it a bit puzzling. Observed the Observer's reviewer: "I enjoyed it so much that I wish I could define it; not being Greek, I have no word for it."

Zorba the Greek resists easy definition. Like the Odyssey and Don Quixote, it is nearly plotless but never pointless. Like the heroes of those fictional sagas, its hero, Alexis Zorba, casts a larger shadow on the world than the world does on him.

Bouncing Grandpa. Who is Zorba? He is Everyman with a Greek accent. He is Sinbad crossed with Sancho Panza. He is the Shavian Life Force poured into a long, lean, fierce-mustached Greek whose 65 years in the Mediterranean sun have neither dimmed his hawk eyes nor dulled his pagan laughter. From the moment when he pounces on the nameless narrator of the story with an abrupt offer—"Taking me with you? ... I can make soups you've never heard or thought of"—Zorba makes the heroes of most modern fiction seem like dyspeptic ghosts.

The narrator, who becomes Zorba's boss and foil, is a 35-year-old scholar, tired, bookworm-eaten, a 20th century Hamlet. Sensing that he ought to get away from his study for a while, he eases off on his definitive life of Buddha and tries to run a lignite mine. Zorba, the would-be cook, becomes his chief engineer. And through Zorba, the scholar learns to see the world fresh each day.

As he kicks a stone "downhill, Zorba turns to the scholar and asks: "Boss, did you see that? On slopes, stones come to life again." Sometimes he is a mythmaker: "My grandfather had a white beard and used to wear rubber shoes. One day he leapt from the roof of our house, but when his feet touched the ground he bounced like a ball and bounced up higher than the house, and went higher and higher still till he disappeared in the clouds. That is how my grandfather died."

"Night Is a Woman." When Zorba is too full for words, he dances in wild leaps like a trout or unslings his santuri (a kind of dulcimer) and plucks from it the haunting laments of the Levant. Zorba is a great unbeliever in everything but the abundant life. Pockmarked with bullet scars, he has no faith in war. Full of reverent awe be fore the universe, he cannot stomach organized religion or priests ("[They] even fleece their fleas"). Child of instinct, Zorba defines the hours as if he had created them. "Daytime is a man," he explains, "night is a woman."