To bring my beloved Shadow to life, I ascend against the current.

"The more I love you, the more the world is useless to me and I do not need it, for I can replace it with another, better, warmer, simpler one, just as I would create my entire life if I were the Creator," writes Nikos Kazantzakis to his companion of thirty years, Helen Kazantzakis, who stood by him as a friend, wife, supporter, helper, and companion.

She notes that in this book, she neither tries to sing his praises nor to paint him in a negative light. Life beside him, she says, was not always easy, yet Nikos Kazantzakis never imposed himself on others. He always chose freedom and rejected compromise. Their cohabitation was an eternal blessing, as Helen matured alongside him and loved him. He offered her love, trust, humor, laughter, mountains and forests, plains and seas, distant travels, Cretan stories, and African tales, and the perfect nakedness before his god.

The Uncompromising, drawing material from the memories, letters, notebooks, and books of Nikos Kazantzakis, is not merely his biography, but a narrative about the years in Aegina with the hunger of the Occupation, the emotions and relentless work, the years in Antibes with reactions alongside creative euphoria, all kinds of quests, dramatic circumstances, travels that forged the absolute unity and identification between the rugged, world-trekking man and the fragile yet brave Athenian woman who accompanied him with faith in life and became a living extension and survival of him after his death.

A passage from the book:

"And here I am now writing a book. Not a novel, that would be too easy. To describe you, to pin you down, to pin you with a golden pin, just like we pin butterflies. And my heart raises a revolution. Because I love butterflies very much and I enjoy imagining them flying light and elusive above our heads."