The Cretan (a trilogy in one volume)

NEW - Will be sent to you direct from the publisher."Pandelis Prevelakis (1909-86), a major Greek writer, has produced over forty volumes of poetry, novels, plays, and essays .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, and 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-sufficient. 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 reading ."

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