Reviews for The Colossus of Maroussi

The average rating for The Colossus of Maroussi based on 2 reviews is 4 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2017-09-11 00:00:00 Jonathan Jeffreys It's the eve of World War II. Dark forces are gathering across Europe, about to tear the continent apart in an unprecedented act of barbarity. Henry Miller travels to Greece, ostensibly to visit a Greek writer but really to reacquaint himself with the humanistic spirit he sees flowing from there--a life-affirming spirit that's the opposite of the impending death everywhere else. Part travelogue, part diatribe, this is a book that's not going to be for everyone. I can certainly understand why some readers will have no patience for passages such as: "It is not enough to overthrow governments, masters, tyrants: one must overthrow his own preconceived ideas of right and wrong, good and bad, just and unjust. We must abandon the hard-fought trenches we have dug ourselves into and come out into the open, surrender our arms, our possessions, our rights as individuals, classes, nations, peoples." It's bombastic, to be sure, but it's also a reaction to events, a pained cry of: why can't we just act differently? It's an attempt to imagine a different, better world, and I was sympathetic to it, just as I was sympathetic to Miller's imagining of the Greek spirit he wanted to capture, a spirit that was as much a creature of his own mind as anything else.

Review # 2 was written on 2008-01-09 00:00:00 Randy Strickland This beautiful and nearly flawless travel memoir is marred by this unfortunate sentence on page 121: "On the way to the library, I made kaka in my pants." Wha? Here's this fabulous surreal narrative about Greece, and suddenly the narrator doesn't just shit himself, he "makes kaka?" Skip page 121.