Books, Arts & Manners: Pale Galilean

The Greek writer Nikos Kazantzakis typifies that mixture of driven, autodidactic erudition and primitive vitality that one often finds among Eastern European literati. Frenziedly seeking ultimate truths, he eclectically absorbed everything from Buddhism to Bergson (with whom he studied) and traveled restlessly across the world in search of reconciliation of our—or his —animal and angelic natures. This duality is portrayed in Zorba the Greek as two characters, and fused, in The Last Temptation of Christ (1951), in the protagonist.

I haven’t read the latter novel, having had quite enough with Zorba and The Greek Passion, a piece of high-minded drivel filmed by Jules Dassin in his fruitiest manner as He Who Must Die. So I can’t say how many of the sillinesses in Martin Scorsese’s misbegotten movie version of The Last Temptation (the Greek version of the title) are attributable to Scorsese and his scenarist, the obnoxious and un-talented Paul Schrader, and how many are Kazantzakis’s own. At least the novelist had (I gather) linguistic and evocative gifts that the movie lacks.

JS

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John Simon

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The Greek writer Nikos Kazantzakis typifies that mixture of driven, autodidactic erudition and primitive vitality that one often finds among Eastern European literati. Frenziedly seeking ultimate truths, he eclectically absorbed everything from Buddhism to Bergson (with whom he studied) and traveled restlessly across the world in search of reconciliation of our—or his —animal and angelic natures. This duality is portrayed in Zorba the Greek as two characters, and fused, in The Last Temptation of Christ (1951), in the protagonist.

I haven’t read the latter novel, having had quite enough with Zorba and The Greek Passion, a piece of high-minded drivel filmed by Jules Dassin in his fruitiest manner as He Who Must Die. So I can’t say how many of the sillinesses in Martin Scorsese’s misbegotten movie version of The Last Temptation (the Greek version of the title) are attributable to Scorsese and his scenarist, the obnoxious and un-talented Paul Schrader, and how many are Kazantzakis’s own. At least the novelist had (I gather) linguistic and evocative gifts that the movie lacks.