Zorba the Greek
A bookish narrator meets an old miner named Zorba on a boat to Crete and spends a year being slowly dismantled by a man who treats life as something to be consumed entirely rather than observed from a safe distance.
Summary
The narrator is a literary, self-conscious intellectual who has been planning to write a book about Buddha for years. He meets Zorba at a Piraeus café: an old man of enormous physical vitality, volcanic opinions, three wives and a santouri. He hires him as foreman for a Cretan lignite mine he intends to open. What follows is a year in which the mine operates poorly while Zorba educates the narrator in living.
Zorba's philosophy is not sophisticated in any academic sense. He dances when he needs to. He eats with complete attention. He loves women without guilt or analysis. He builds an elaborate cable system to transport timber down a mountain, it collapses spectacularly on its demonstration day, and he responds by dancing on the beach. The catastrophe doesn't revise him.
Kazantzakis uses the narrator as the proxy for the reader's own hesitations: watching rather than doing, planning rather than acting, aestheticizing experience rather than having it. Zorba's function is to make this hesitation visible and slightly contemptible without being cruel about it. He doesn't judge the narrator; he simply lives in front of him.
The novel's argument is simple enough to dismiss and difficult to actually act on: the examined life that is never lived is not actually a life. The narrator understands this completely by the end and remains constitutionally unable to act on it. Zorba would have laughed.
Quotes
"I felt, as I read, that the world was dissolving, becoming a vision, an illusion, a daydream."
"A man needs a little madness, or else he never dares cut the rope and be free."