European Reading Challenge #4

I read this for the European Reading Challenge 2026.

Colossus of Maroussi - Henry Miller

The author of Tropic of Cancer took an extended trip in Greece from August, 1939 to early January, 1940.  He wrote about the Greeks because he met people whose exuberance matched his own. The title, in fact, refers to Katsambalis, a Neal Casady-like character, larger than life.

Miller describes the beauties of Athens, Corfu, Crete, Mycenae, Delphi and many other spots.  He focuses on his own response to people that he talked to and meals that he ate. The intended audience is anybody who enjoyed his previous writings or feels slacking is a reasonable alternative to struggling against The Combine. Miller argues that Greece teaches how to be human being, simple and transcendent, again, instead of replaceable wheels in the industrial machine.

Miller is besotted with Greece but he never gushes.  His colloquial style is the readable antitheses of his travel companion Lawrence Durrell’s nearly impenetrable multi-syllabic prose. While not always coherent or clear or sensible, Miller’s informal voice is forceful, original, fluid, readable, with a mix of everyday lingo and mystical words that don’t mean much.

On the other hand, he makes few nods to Greek history and none to geography. He doesn’t read newspapers so he willfully pig-ignorant of the world on fire in the run-up to WWII. Miller gives no word, not one, about Orthodox Christianity and its possible influence on the world view of the Greeks. Miller sometimes babbles or pontificates for pages at a time. Oddly, there are times when he sounds preachy, as when he sums up his revelations and shares them with us lesser beings at the end of Part 1. For somebody so astute and down to earth, he’s strangely credulous upon receiving the findings of an Armenian astrologer that he visits in Athens. It’s one thing to be a clown or holy fool, quite another to be a gull.

This is the book for you if Miller’s preference for old hotels resonates: "I like hotels which are second or third rate, which are clean but shabby, which have seen better days, which have an aroma of the past." I think it suits the intended audience, of skeptics, malcontents, seekers and those who connect with the neglected and out of the way.

I liked this book, though my eyes did roll rather. It was the first Miller I’d read in about 20 years. I’d forgotten how vigorous his prose was. If his goal was to get me to want to visit Greece, he met it.

 I don’t think I’d re-read this book but I recommend it to any readers into travel books written between the wars. This book is one of the last ones of the era and genre, which ended in September 1939.