ejwashington 's review for:

Zorba the Greek by Nikos Kazantzakis

1.0

challenging reflective slow-paced

Plot or Character Driven: Character

Strong character development: Yes

Loveable characters: No

Diverse cast of characters: No

Flaws of characters a main focus: Yes

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I started this novel with nothing but optimism. Its prose is exquisite, lovely, and life-affirming, just as its blurbs say. What the blurbs don’t say: this novel is unrelentingly misogynistic. I’ve read many classics; I’ve read many “old white men write women” novels. But nothing that drips with so much objectification.

This goes far beyond, with passages like: “They are wild beasts, wild beasts, and they know it. Compared to them, males are such feeble, transient, foolish, inane creatures without endurance. These wild beasts resemble various female insects–the praying mantis, the grasshopper, the spider–female insects that, insatiable at dawn, feed by devouring males.” or, “I’m not ashamed of crying in front of men. I’m a man; we’re all the same tribe and it’s not shameful for us. But in front of women we always need to appear brave. Why? Because if we started weeping in our turn, what would happen to those poor creatures? It would be the end of everything.“

The villagers in the novel brutally decapitate a widow (who has been nothing but objectified throughout the whole of the novel) for unclear—or nonexistent—crimes.

Women are never people in this novel—they are, by turns, donkeys, devils, teases, whores, seductresses, or brainless fools. Things. This aspect completely overshadowed the somewhat interesting ideas surrounding vitalism and buddhist-inspired themes of detachment. Reading this novel as a woman was a humiliating experience.