Otobiyografik bu kitaplar, Yengeç Dönencesi, Oğlak Dönencesi ve Marousi’nin Devi sıralamasıyla okunduğunda yazarın hayatı ve gelişim süreci daha anlaşılır ve daha anlamlı olabilir. Yes, yes," said Tsoutsou, clapping his hands, "that's the wonderful thing about America: you don't know what defeat is." He filled the glasses again and rose to make a toast "To America!" he said, "long may it live!" Yet, the protagonist in the book is the Colossus Katsimbalis although some critics say that the book is a self-portrait of Miller himself on a journey of a lifetime in an unforgettable place. After his life-changing journey to Greece, Miller returned to the United States. The Colossus of Maroussi was published in 1941. It was his third book and his favorite.

I was like Robinson Crusoe on the island of Tobago. For hours at a stretch I would lie in the sun doing nothing, thinking of nothing. To keep the mind empty is a feat, a very healthful feat too. To be silent the whole day long, see no newspaper, hear no radio, listen to no gossip, be thoroughly and completely lazy, thoroughly and completely indifferent to the fate of the world is the finest medicine a man can give himself. The book-learning gradually dribbles away; problems melt and dissolve; ties are gently severed; thinking, when you deign to indulge in it, becomes very primitive; the body becomes a new and wonderful instrument; you look at plants or stones or fish with different eyes; you wonder what people are struggling to accomplish with their frenzied activities; you know there is a war on but you haven't the faintest idea what it's about or why people should enjoy killing one another; you look at a place like Albania—it was constantly staring me in the eyes—and you say to yourself, yesterday it was Greek, to-day it's Italian, to-morrow it may be German or Japanese, and you let it be anything it chooses to be. When you're right with yourself it doesn't matter which flag is flying over your head or who owns what or whether you speak English or Monongahela. The absence of newspapers, the absence of news about what men are doing in different parts of the world to make life more livable or unlivable is the greatest single boon. If we could just eliminate newspapers a great advance would be made, I am sure of it. Newspapers engender lies, hatred, greed, envy, suspicion, fear, malice. We don't need the truth as it is dished up to us in the daily papers. We need peace and solitude and idleness. If we could all go on strike and honestly disavow all interest in what our neighbor is doing we might get a new lease on life. We might learn to do without telephones and radios and newspapers, without machines of any kind, without factories, without mills, without mines, without explosives, without battleships, without politicians, without lawyers, without canned goods, without gadgets, without razor blades even or cellophane or cigarettes or money. This is a pipe dream, I know.” Fortunately her husband reappeared at this point with the post-cards which he had given a dry-cleaning.” At the dawn of a new golden age for Greece, with the football team grinding out a victory over Portugal, 1-0, in the final of Euro 2004, and Elena Paparizou about to carry off the Eurovision Song Contest in 2005, rough-trade canines were seen by outsiders as a cosmetic issue. You couldn’t blow billions of euros on Olympic complexes, a Metro system, Baghdads of synchronised fireworks, and have TV coverage fouled up with drooling, belly-on-the-floor bandits, begging for leftovers and shitting on your shoes. There was talk – the Berliner was right about that – of taking them out, but not with guns, rather by the traditional Socratic solution, poison. But the dogs were family, and were treated as such: cleaned up, neutered, turned loose.It’s a pity nobody reads Miller, because it’s all there: the damaged, wine-fired poet playing with utopian blueprints, constructing fabulous cities on overscribbled sheets of paper. De Quincey nightmares that fade in the cold Athenian dawn. Dreams that know they are dreams. All too soon the Germans would arrive and the craziest (and most frustrated) architect of them all, Adolf Hitler, would salute the proud ruins.

Phew. I read the book and immediately gave it away, not bearing for it to be unshared. I had entered a new realm. I had confirmed that my responsibilities were not just to myself, or to little England, but to the imagination and to something far greater than my present parlous condition. My immediate miserableness and loneliness were as nothing. And so what if I had nothing to show for life, no house or job, money or prospects? I too was a millionaire in spirit. I too had self-belief. Unfortunately, our bloviating Greek poet friend is just getting warmed up: English hasn't got any guts to-day. You're all castrated, you've become business men, engineers, technicians. It sounds like wooden money dropping into a sewer.As a result, this 1941 literary bombshell, ostensibly about Greece, documents Miller's memories of New York inspired by a view of Athens, provides a lengthy disquisition on jazz when he's confronted by a French woman who disdains the chaos of Greece, and paints a disquieting, mad, and ominous picture of Saturn when he climbs to an observatory and views it through a telescope. He tells us his dreams and daydreams and what he wished he would have said. Everything is fair game; the seeming digressions frequent and fabulous. And I wanted to like it. Miller was close friends with Lawrence Durrell, who I know well as "Larry" from his younger brother Gerald's hilarious books about his childhood running wild in Corfu. My desire to recapture a bit of that magic was dashed over and over as Miller drones on about Agamemnon or whatever the hell. On the content side, he outright orientalizes Greece conflating modern poverty with mythological romance in his ham-fisted attempt to indict America for all sorts of modern ills. And then there's the misogyny: "... I was impressed by the absence of those glaring defects which make even the most beautiful American or English woman glaringly ugly. The Greek woman even when she is cultured, is first and foremost a woman. She sheds a distinct fragrance; she warms and thrills you." UGH. It's on paper a travel book, but if you are looking for some sort of in-depth, detailed account of Greece and it's history, then this will not be the book for you, as that's not really the kind of book it is. It is more a journey of self-discovery for Miller and revelation, and although he does talk about the places he visits and gives a good account of them in his own poetic way, it's more about how Greece makes him feel, than anything else. He clearly has quite a spiritual awakening while spending time there, and he writes in a very effusive way, seeming as if he's becoming almost ecstatically happy and joyous as he travels around; philosophising with rapturous delight half the time, unless he's caught in a downpour, or being bothered by the odd tedious individual, here and there...