Reading between the lines

For some reason I have been putting off reading this book for a long time and I never watched the movie because it seemed so “colonial English”. A lot of the book is quite mundane and about the ways of the English thinking adorably of the “British empire”. The book is a sad story if not an outright tragedy about dedicating your life to the wrong causes and the wrong people. The main character is Stevens who is the butler at Darlington Hall and spent most of his life serving Lord Darlington. The lord eventually dies and the house has been bought by an American as after the second world war, it was the Americans who grabbed most of the spoils. The American doesn’t entertain as often as Darlington did and for that matter spends most of his time in America leaving large parts of Darlington Hall under wraps and with a skeletal staff on duty to maintain the house. Under these diminished circumstances, the butler Stevens recollects nostalgic memories of old times and even

This is a book of Nikos Kazantzakis that I found a bit disappointing but then I guess the book was set in a gloomy time in the history of Crete. An island occupied by Turkey but with Greek ancestry, it is about the freedom struggle of Crete. Crete has seen several uprisings and the book is set probably towards the end of the 1800s or the early 1900s just before the First World War. The book takes the reader through the uprising, how it started, the feeling that culminated in fighting and the foregone conclusion. As usual, spoiler alerts. At the heart of the novel is Captain Michales who is like the Braveheart in this novel. A humorless man, he feels nothing but pain and agony with Crete being occupied. He has fought in a previous uprising and survived. Was given amnesty and safe passage to escape to Greece but refused to go. “Freedom or Death” was his slogan. And eventually his agony causes him to begin the fighting by provoking the Turks. After a few retaliations,