Pandelis Prevelakis Abbott Rick Peter (1 results)

Hardcover. Condition: Like New. Dust Jacket Condition: Like New. Blue cloth covered hardcover with gilt lettering to spine. Dust jacket has minor wear to head of spine. 8vo. (9 x 1.5 x 6 inches) Clean text free of marks or underlining. Maps on front and endpapers. B&W photos and illustrations. Includes maps and a glossary. 480 pp. Fast shipping in a secure book box mailer with tracking. Pandelis Prevelakis (1909-86), a major Greek writer, has produced over forty volumes of poetry, novels, plays and essays. On the occasion of the American edition of his novel, The Sun of Death (1964), Henry Miller greeted the Cretan author as "a writer whose mind and spirit excite me, whose language awakens reverberations of other kindred souls whose work I have adored since early youth."Prevelakis has long been in the shadow of his close friend and fellow Cretan Nikos Kazantzakis. It is time that Prevelakis's work be made known and independently appraised in the non-Greek world as it has been in the Greek. The English edition of his major work, The Cretan, is a step in that direction. In this Tolstoyan historical novel, Prevelakis offers a masterly presentation of the Cretan myth with its peculiar Cretan ethos characterized by "piety, austerity, frugality, dourness, sternness punctuated by sudden outbursts of reckless daring." The Cretan is the story of Crete and its people struggling for individual and national liberation from Turkish rule, a struggle symbolized in the two main characters of the novel, the fictional Konstandis and the historical Venizelos, both figures of epic proportions The Cretan is three books in one: The Tree; The First Freedom; The State. And as its author explained, "The Tree presents a young man, growing and maturing like a sapling in the local popular culture, which was closed and rudimentary, but self-suffi-cient. The First Freedom describes the struggles of the mature man together with his comrades to achieve national liberation. Lastly, The State depicts the national fighters sacrificing themselves for the second precondition of a decent life, in other words, a democratic state." The Cretan will delight readers who may have spent some time on Crete. It will, most likely, encourage those who have not been to Crete to plan for a visit there in the near future. In any event, it is absorbing veading rever to guste Miller again, Pre-velakisdom, the true method of education, the true means of implanting faith and love of life.".