The Ascension of Nikos Kazantzakis – an Atypical Novel Formula

The Ascension of Nikos Kazantzakis represents a kind of founding pattern, situated between a novel of initiation and a travelogue, crossed by passion and an unrepressed tendency towards a special form of soteriology. Somehow balancing certain artistic, civic, and spiritual inclinations, the volume belongs to a paradigm that illuminates most of Kazantzakis’ writings. This vast spiritual confession expresses the author's profession of faith, that writing is a healing act, necessary and, above all, very audacious. The opus is also a kind of literary manifesto, representative of the memory of the XXth century, as well as an illustrative landmark for what, nowadays, metamodernity means. The whole book consists of a wide and apparently Hamletian monologue on the fragility of existence, on the inconsistency of the thinking reed, on the fragility of the human condition.