it is accomplished!

For several months now, I have been slogging through Nikos Kazantzakis' The Last Temptation of Christ. It's a book that I've always wanted to read and the Scorsese movie version impacted me a lot when I saw it in college. Ben and Kyle both read and loved it. So last winter, just before Christmas time, I started the novel... and couldn't stand it.

It was weird because I had always assumed that it would be right up my alley. I had assumed that Kazantzakis's project was similar to what I did in my play Three Days in the Tomb (which is being officially given an "honorable mention," though not performed, in D.C. this week at the Catholic University of America as part of their Religious One-Act Play Festival). I thought he was re-dramatizing the life of Jesus as a human being, making his choices realer and more contemporary. I was immediately turned off by the "fruitiness" of the book (for lack of a better word), the weird mysticism, the florid metaphors, the fact that all of the characters (from Magdalene, to Judas, to Samuel) all seemed to have grown up with Jesus and to be some cousin of his. It was a weird book and I couldn't figure out what it was getting at. Rather than altering scripture it tended to reproduce many of the gospel stories almost exactly as the Bible depicts them. When things were altered, it was seemingly random. I could find no pattern to the madness but I'd invested so much time into reading it (I'd gotten through about 350 pages) that I refused to give up. I just put my reading on hold.

Since Christmas I refrained from reading other books because I had the last 150 pages of Last Temptation waiting for me. But every time I tried to pick it up I got confused, or bored, or lost in the story or I quickly fell asleep. My high school English teacher/drama coach, David W. Frank, was fanous for his arbitrary rules; one was, "If you've read less than 50 pages of a book and it doesn't interest you, you can set it aside with a clear mind. But if you've read past page 50, you owe it to yourself it finish it." (Which is a weird rule: surely the page count should be on a sliding scale!)

Anyway, today I finished it and I will conclude this much: it got better. The mysticism achieved more of a sustained power the closer you got to the crucifixion. There were some incredible, extra-Scriptural passages (like when the corpse-like resuscitated Lazarus is hanging out with the dsiciples or when Simon of Cyrene comes to scold them as they hide from the Jews). I didn't buy the psychological depiction of Jesus in the early part of the book; his mood swings seemed arbitrary and he didn't feel real. He still didn't feel "real" by the end, but I think I came to understand what Kazantzakis was trying to do: exploring the struggles between the Spirit and the Flesh, reconciling the truths that he (Kazantzakis) had discovered in Christianity, but also in Buddhism, Nietzsche, Marxism etc. His take on Christianity is fraught with a lot of hang-ups, but they're not necessarily the same hang-ups that I have, so I'm not immediately drawn into his thrashing out of them. It's a personal vision and a complelling one, but one that I would have preferred to get in a smaller dose.

There were two quotes from the last two chapters, though, that I liked:

• The Apostle Paul addressing Jesus: "I create the truth, create it out of obstinacy and longing and faith. I don't struggle to find it--I build it. I build it taller than men and thus I make men grow. If the world is to be saved, it is necessary--do you hear--absolutely necessary for you to be crucified, and I shall crucify you, like it or not; it is necessary for you to be resurrected, and I shall resurrect you, like it or not."
• Thomas: "A prophet is one who, when everyone else despairs, hopes. And when everyone else hopes, he despairs."

So, I got something out of the long ordeal. But mostly, I'm just happy to be able to move on! Next on my reading list: The Island at the Center of the World: The Epic Story of Dutch Manhattan & the Colony that Shaped America by Russell Shorto and Saturday by Ian McEwan.

And maybe someday I'll get around to watching that other famous dramatization of Christ that I've always assumed I'm going to love, Pasolini's film The Gospel According to St. Matthew. Word to the wise, though: Don't (always) believe the hype.