Comment

Aug 21, 2015wyenotgo rated this title 5 out of 5 stars
This is a truly spetacular book, the work of a devout believer who, despite his deep faith or perhaps because of it, feels compelled to explore the "story behind the story" of Christ's adult life, to worm his way inside the events leading up to the crucifixtion. It is by no means an easy read at the beginning, coming across somewhat like a protracted, confusing nightmare. The darkness begins to clear after a couple of chapters and the story takes over. I first read it in my late teens, at a time when I was trying to get my head around this business of religious faith, what & whom to believe, what it might mean to me personally, or whether any of it mattered at all. The book didn't answer any of those questions but I'm quite certain it contributed to my youthful, frivolous mind a measure of intellectual maturity that had been absent up to that point. That alone is a lot to say for any book. When I read it again after many years and a good deal of living, the book struck me very differently, every bit as disturbing but a great deal more hopeful. That's an even more remarkable thing for the book to have achieved, given the fact that I personally no longer hold any religious beliefs at all, regarding it all as pure mythology of no consequence. Despite that, the book is still enthralling. Kazantzakis is without doubt one of the greatest writers of the past hundred years.