Start with Zorba the Greek. It is the obvious choice and, unusually, the correct one: it is the shortest way into the argument that runs through everything else he wrote, between the man who thinks and the man who acts, and it is the only one of his novels that is genuinely funny.
The alternative people reach for is The Last Temptation of Christ, usually because of the film. Do not start there. It is a better novel, but it assumes you already know what Kazantzakis is doing with religious material, and read cold it flattens into provocation.
The Cretan novels
Freedom or death comes next. It is the Cretan uprising against Ottoman rule, and it is where his prose is at its most physical. Be careful buying it: the Greek original is Captain Michalis, and British editions have appeared as Freedom and Death. Three names, one book.
Christ recrucified has the same problem in sharper form — it is sold in the United States as The Greek Passion, and readers regularly end up with two copies. The premise is a village staging a Passion play whose actors begin living their assigned roles. It is the most schematic of the major novels and also the most immediately gripping.
The religious books
The Last Temptation of Christ belongs here, once the pattern is familiar. The Orthodox Church moved against Kazantzakis over it and the Vatican placed it on the Index; both facts are usually reported as scandal, but the book's actual interest is narrower and stranger than the controversy suggests.
Saint francis is the companion piece and is also published as God's Pauper. It is gentler and, for some readers, the more moving of the two. The fratricides is the late novel of the Greek Civil War, unfinished business in more than one sense, and the bleakest thing in the list.
The Saviors of God Spiritual Exercises is the philosophical core — the credo the novels dramatise. Our catalogue records it with the translator's name attached to the title, which is a record artefact; the book is a short, aphoristic and quite difficult text, and it is the one to read when you want the argument without the story. Kimon Friar's translation is the standard one.
Travel and the summing-up
Journey to the Morea is the Peloponnese travel book, published in Britain as Travels in Greece, and it is the easiest late Kazantzakis to read. The Odyssey; a Modern Sequel is not: it is an epic poem of thirty-three thousand lines that picks up where Homer stops, and almost nobody finishes it. Attempt it only if the rest has convinced you.
Finish with Report to Greco. It is the spiritual autobiography, assembled at the end of his life, and it is the book that makes retrospective sense of the others. Several readers find it the best thing he wrote.
A translation warning worth taking seriously
A number of the standard English Kazantzakis texts were made from French intermediaries rather than from the Greek, and the difference is audible — flatter, more decorous, less violent than the originals are said to be. Where a Peter Bien translation exists, most scholars prefer it. This is not a settled hierarchy and readers disagree, but it is worth checking the translator before buying rather than after.
Stop after Report to Greco unless you are committed. The full sequence, with the dual titles noted where they matter, is on the path below.
Follow the full ordered path here: Nikos Kazantzakis in Order: Where to Begin Beyond Zorba.
