Lawrence Durrell Books

An evocative memoir of the author's stay [1953-6] in what's now Northern Cyprus. Much of the landscape was still as he described it when we visited Belle Pais, Famagusta, Kyrenia, and Nicosia, the Tree of Idleness and other sites on our hiking trip to Cyprus in 2001. His adventures in buying and maintaining a house rival those of Peter Mayle's "A Year in Provence"written many years later. The peaceful interludes in the hills are marred by foreshadowing of the political turmoil and tragedies that would engulf Cyprus in the following decades, leading to the departure of Durrell and other foreign nationals. Some of those towns and even cities remain ghost towns to this day

I visited Mr. Durrell's house in 1991 while visiting my relatives in the American Embassy (it has a little sign that says Bitter Lemons). I didn't want to go to Cypress; it was just something to do to kill time one summer with my family. I read the book on the way there and finished it a day before the trip to the Turkish side of the island. It was like a light had been turned on and it has never been out since. I plan and I go everywhere now and as often as I can. Good enough to purchase another copy after 15 years of use.

I read this book because I'm planning a trip to Cyprus next year. My only previous exposure to Lawrence Durrell's work was PROSPERO'S CELL, his evocative memoir of Corfu. In that book, he tells of having to leave the beautiful island because of the impending World War II. In BITTER LEMONS, Durrell once again finds an island paradise that he has to leave because of political violence. The early chapters of the book are mostly humorous sketches about the lazy life of beautiful Cyprus and the colorful local characters. His happy island home becomes a kind of salon for globetrotting artists and intellectuals. Then about halfway through the book, political trouble starts brewing and terrorism becomes a fact of daily life, destroying Durrell's friendships with the people he had come to love. During this crisis, Durrell, a schoolmaster, is enlisted to serve as an administrator in the British government. There, he finds himself in the frustrating position of watching the crisis escalating all around him and being powerless to do anything about it. Durrell documents the events leading up to a standoff between the British and the Cypriots, primarily the result of British bureaucratic indifference. The book is beautifully written. Durrell was a poet and novelist and his descriptive prose evokes the colors, tastes and smells of the island in a way that is very moving. I enjoyed the early part of the book more than the parts dealing with politics. Durrell could easily have written this as two books and, in a way, I wish he had. The book left me with a terrible sense of loss, but that is perhaps what Durrell intended. This is a sad book.

_Bitter Lemons_ begins as you would expect a piece of travel writing to do-- with Durrell's impressions about Cyprus, some history, the stories of his first days there and the way in which he comes to make himself a home on the island.

Where it ultimately goes, however, is somewhere far different than most travel writing. Durrell is drawn into the conflict around Cypriot independence and is forced to examine his position as expatriot in a troubled environment.

The initial chapters of the book are so lovely and the scenes sketched so charming, that something in the reader rebels when the book turns its attention to the problem of terrorism and the echos of violence. That very quality, of course, is what lifts the book above the average travel book as it creates a Cyprus for the reader than is far more real-- not just a utopian garden existing somewhere far, far away for the weary reader to someday visit.

This book, along with a couple by Henry Miller and a few others of Durrell's, was responsible for causing my husband and me to leave life and jobs in LA and move to Greece for nearly a year. Bitter Lemons is part memoir, part political commentary, part travel writing, and part philosophy. It's the story of Durrell's fairly brief stay on the island of Cyprus, conflict between Greeks and Turks, impending world war, buying a house and trying to settle into a unique niche of the world. It's a book about Life and all its myriad difficulties.
Tip-top - and wonderful writing. It's one of those books whose memory will stay with me always.

I'm re-reading the series in order. "Justine" was a fine introduction and scene-setter: "Balthazar" somehow had less impact, though the life and passing of old Scobie make a hilarious thread running through it. But "Mountolive" comes to life with a vengeance! It may have something to do with his opportunity, in this version of the story, to draw with a very sharp pencil some of the products of the English society that he scorned - yet there is a strong sense of sympathy for the diplomat David Mountolive, trapped in a world of illusion and deceit.

This is the volume where some of the hidden currents swirling under the surface of the other two are exposed. Many surprises: many motives revealed: and above all, many wonderful set-pieces. There's the desert festival of Sitna Damiana, with the amazing transfiguration of Narouz. The bitter meeting between Mountolive and his former love, the then-beautiful younger Leila, where now after many years and the ravages of smallpox, "He saw a plump and square-faced Egyptian lady of uncertain years, with a severely pock-marked face and eyes drawn grotesquely out of true by the antimony-pencil." And the unforgettable discreet transaction between Nessim and Memlik Pasha: Nessim's "offering" is almost too elegant to be called a bribe: it is an addition to Memlik's prized collection of Korans, this one an "exquisite little Koran wrapped in soft tissue paper: he had carefully larded the pages with bank drafts negotiable in Switzerland."

But above all, the final apocalyptic revelation, the full, dark blossom of total treachery and death makes an unforgettable climax. This is the one that deserves to be called a "page-turner."

Now I have two small caveats or alerts to record. One is a little piece of trickery that Durrell uses all the time, which is effective until you notice it, then you say "Oh, not again!" I almost hesitate to mention it - should I lessen others' pleasure? but heck, this is a review! It's simply this: the excessive use of the word "great."

See, it adds a sense of importance to whatever it describes. How many times does "the great car" bear them silently along the Corniche?" What a different impression it makes to have someone draw up the "great iron gates" instead of just "wide" or even "black" or "imposing" iron gates? It's not an annual duck-shoot on Lake Mareotis, it's "the great annual duck-shoot." And on and on...Mountolive sits at the "great desk," in Mountolive's English family home his mother spends her time in front of "the great fireplace..." Oh well. We can forgive him this considering the wonderful work as a whole.

The other alert is that today's reader may be startled to see the n-word used in several places, with all its accustomed freight of stereotyping. In this respect Durrell was a product of his society and generation, unfortunately.

But five stars anyway for an extraordinary reading experience.

Oh - something I just noticed here...someone tagged the book with "spanish!" I've noticed before how people can read a book - or see a DVD - and get MAJOR things totally wrong!

Lawrence Durrell has a beautiful mind. He's fun, very intelligent and witty. His biography is fascinating and he is uniquely qualified to write these novels, The Alexandria Quartet, set in the Mediterranian. The strengths of the novels are their evocation of the place and time, the characters and their lovely, loving interractions. Some of the observations on art and love are a bit of a stretch, however. Durrell himself is composite of the characters Darley, Balthazar and Arnauti. He's Irish by nationality but he grew up around the Mediterranian.

The Alexandria Quartet is one of the great works of the 20th century, especially if you wish you had lived in a simpler time and more interesting place, and had some interesting loves. Almost up to Ulysses, maybe not quite so pretentious.

This series so far - - "The Alexandria Quartet" - - has been one of the most interesting and wonderful things I have ever read. Memorable in every way. To be savored and remembered. Just simply a dazzling accomplishment by Durrell. "Mountolive" is written in 3rd person, unlike the first two, and it explores more of the motives and facts of the same people in the same time period - yet another layer - than of emotions and longings. And now we finally get to the bottom of Nessim, Justine, Narouz, and Pursewarden. And we learn of the conspiracy behind the first two novels, and we learn of Mountolive's life. All these people are so alive in my mind, Mountolive being such a sad, pathetic man. Yet once again Egypt and Alexandria take center stage. What a writer this man was!

I read this book before reading the other 3 in the quartet, and I absolutely loved it. It made reading the others irresistible, and yet I believe this third edition is the best. The love stories are incredibly deep and diverse, and Durrell's writing is both beautiful and inspiring.
Mountolive is an Englishman working with the Foreign Service who comes to know his Dionysian self in the humidity and turmoil of early 20th century Egypt. He falls in love with his married hostess, and this relationship leaves him capable of loving only one woman and one place. The other notable couples portray a stunning array of what drives people toward love. A desire for power drives Justine and Nessim together as it does much more subtlely in the vignette about Amaril and Semira. This book stands out on its own but leaves you dying to find out more about these rich characters.

Poor Mountolive. This is a tale of his rise to success and his parallel loss of being able to respond humanely, and his ultimate debasement. In addtion, Durrell continues to remove layers of the Alexandrian social web: Justine's motivations are different again. I worry that they will change again in the last of the series. Motivations for love continue to be explored. I wish I had started a list when I started reading these books of all the different nuances of love and various motivations. It really has made me think.

If you read the first two of the quartet, you cannot afford to miss this installment. It really helps you understand the mysteries. Of course, Durrell continues in his mastery of the language. Descriptions continue to be lush.

If you made your way through Alexandria Quartet and marveled at the dueling dual achievements of writer and reader, don't miss The Black Book. Some things in Durrell are very trying ("... to try and ..."; too many things are 'mauve') but almost every paragraph contains a unique insight.

This was Durrell's first major novel, & anticipates many of the ideas which would dominate his later works. While the book is slightly derivative in regard to Henry Miller's 'Tropic of Cancer', it goes far beyond Miller's idea of the Western death-consciousness, and is wonderfully inventive and energetic. As a response to James Joyce, it is a portrait of the artist as an ANGRY young man. Well worth the time and cost.

Lawrence Durrell had two novels to his credit ('Pied Piper of Lovers' and 'Panic Spring') when T.S. Eliot, Durrell's editor at Faber & Faber, said that 'The Black Book' was 'the first piece of work by a new English writer to give me any hope for the future of prose fiction'. In a complex tale set in a seedy London hotel, Durrell spun a narrative which was to foreshadow his best-known work of two decades later, the Alexandria Quartet in its dealings with time, characterisation, and narrative. Memorable characters and rich prose swirl around the central figure of Lawrence Lucifer. Considered unpublishable in 1937, it did not find its way into print in Britain until 1961. Well worth the time if you find a copy.

This is a magnificent book. The legend around it is that Durrell sent the manuscript for this to Henry Miller, in Paris, and asked that he read it and then toss it in the Seine... Miller read it, and obviously did not cast it away, instead helped to have it published... TS Eliot was one of the guys responsible for getting this out. So goes the name dropping...

Now, I'm not a fan of Miller's works. Sue me, the guy just doesn't appeal to my sensibilities... And most of Lawrence Durrell's later novels don't do much for me either- I'm not sure what it is, I feel like the power of The Black Book, all its vigor and spleen, all that lyrical spite became diminished, somehow. I love the language of this book. The fisrt couple pages- I can read them over and over. I've read them to my little brother, my mother, several girlfriends...

All values are personal in their manifestation- as I said, I have read parts of this (my favorite parts) to people before and they were not as moved as I was. So I'm not claiming this to be the key text that will unlock 20th C. literature for you (look to Celine for that!). It's just highly reccommended to you as an angry denunciation of a world long gone. The author is trapped in his values, his place, his class and he wants to burn it all away, tear it all down- all the emptiness, the lack of connection, the bald hypocrisy and the babbling of the masses. The lies and the desolate souls around him that murmur... But he can't help loving the world he loathes, the beauty and transience of it... and can't help but loathe himself for loving it... I'm rambling... And I haven't said a thing about plot or characters... So be it.

If you are a fan of Isaac Babel, Platonov, John Kennedy Toole, Charles Portis, TS Eliot, Sartre, Henry Miller, Wallace Stevens, John Fowles, Calvino, Tibor Fischer, Unamuno, Burroughs... There's some slice of similarity in all those writers...

I am numbed, bedazzled, and incredibly sad to have finished this exquisite world Durrell has created. Must rank with "Memoirs of Hadrian" by Marguarite Yourcenar, as one of the very best things I have ever read. Spellbinding is a good word, for his words truly weave a spell within the mind. "Clea", like all the rest, was stunning. Is there something about delta cities?

Durrell further explores not only another love for Darley, but what art is and what it ought to be. Of course, descriptions are lush. One can almost hear hear the music of the closing festival and the beating of its drums.

Clea and Darley's relationship is embroidered over a wartime background. Durrell uses their beautiful private island experiences to echo and foreshadow the rise and fall of this relationship.

And we see how Clea develops as an artist. We are given Pursewarden's posthumous discourse on the philosophy of art. He gives is a lot to think about.

Sometimes I think that Durrell is Pursewarden, and then I wonder if he is making fun of himself in the Darley character. And in reality I find that I wish I could meet and know Durrell.

Clea is another must read.

What can one say about perfection? One does not just look at the ceiling of the Cistine Chapel as a great work of art but rather as perfection personified, merely mediated by paints and gilt. This book is exactly the same, its perfection is personified not by pigments and gold, but by ink and prose.

It is indeed rare that an artist pours their all into their work,but when it does occur, be it in the 9th Symphony of Beethoven or Kubrick's 2001, it is unilaterally hailed as a magnum opus.

Clea, in my opinion is just such a work. The way in which Durrell contrasts the blunt style of description with the uncompairable beauty of the subject matter pushes the book deeper into the sanctum sanctorum of literary perfection.

In thinking about this review, perfection seems too cold and metallic a word to be applied to such a beautiful work of art. There seems to be no word that accurately describes the flawless beauty of this book, but these are the limitations of language. Perhaps if I spoke Italian.

heey, this is CLEA. I was named after this excellent book. I've read it thrice...it's cool!! I love it!

Called the best guidebook ever written, Forster's homage to Alexandria is at once informative, evocative, and nostalgic. The first half of the book is a series of vignettes on various moments and characters in the city's history. Forster immersed himself in the literature of ancient Alexandria and Greece, and it is this intimate acquaintance with the thought of the old city that gives the historical section its depth. Using a style that, though terse, always has time for a story or interesting quote, he covers the ancient library and mouseion, the Alexandrian contributions to science, the Christian and Arab periods. In the celebrated section "The Spiritual City," he outlines the religious heritage of Alexandria, demonstrating how Christianity as we know it today was largely formed in this city. Durrell drew heavily on this section for the gnostic theme that runs through the Quartet. The historical section concludes with a translation of Cavafy's "The God Abandons Antony," the first Cavafy poem to appear in print in English, and Forster considered the primary achievement of his guidebook to be the introduction of Cavafy to the English-speaking world.
Each historical section is linked to sections in the guide, and Forster claimed that "the 'sights' of Alexandria are in themselves not interesting, but they fascinate when we approach them through the past." Forster spent much time on trams in Alexandria, and the great love of his life, Mohammed el Adl, was a tram conductor on the Bacos route. It is fitting, then, that the tramlines should provide the web holding the guidebook together. Forster takes us through the city by tram, pointing out interesting buildings and sites to left and right. The guide also contains maps of the ancient and modern city, and plans of the Greco-Roman Museum and the Wadi Natrun monasteries.
The book had a difficult birth: Forster's Alexandrian publisher suffered a fire in which they thought the books had been burned. After recouping insurance compensation, they discovered that they had in fact survived. They then decided to burn the books deliberately. In 1935, members of the Royal Archaeological Society of Alexandria decided to reprint the book. Forster put some work into revisions, but this second edition did not sell well, and it was only after the book was published in the US that it achieved moderate sales.
More than any other guidebook, Forster's comes across as a labor of love. Lawrence Durrell wrote of the guidebook that Forster "must have been deeply happy, perhaps deeply in love . . . Paradoxically, if that is the word, the book is also saturated with the feeling of loneliness, that of a cultivated man talking to himself, walking by himself."

Recently read and used this book while in Alexandria. There is essential information, beautifully organized, presented and written that should be available. Introduction by Lawrence Durrell is wonderful too.

An evocative memoir of the author's stay [1953-6] in what's now Northern Cyprus. Much of the landscape was still as he described it when we visited Belle Pais, Famagusta, Kyrenia, and Nicosia, the Tree of Idleness and other sites on our hiking trip to Cyprus in 2001. His adventures in buying and maintaining a house rival those of Peter Mayle's "A Year in Provence"written many years later. The peaceful interludes in the hills are marred by foreshadowing of the political turmoil and tragedies that would engulf Cyprus in the following decades, leading to the departure of Durrell and other foreign nationals. Some of those towns and even cities remain ghost towns to this day. Once hard to find, this book has now been deservedly reissued.

I wouldn't want to spoil the thing by saying too much, but it was a very interesting read, aside from being intensely pleasant. There's a certain delicacy, about death, and strife, and the drinking of wine. Durrell is well spoken and well informed: you might think, like I did, that the story of Cyprus isn't politically relevant. But I only thought that because I'm an ignorant American, and because I had yet to read this lovely book.

A writer of outstanding repute in all his endeavors (translator, novelist, critic), Keeley has temporarily left aside all that academic stuff to write one of the five most beautiful books I have read in the past twenty years. Greek and Anglo literati like Seferis, Durrell and Miller come alive for us in these pages and special features of their work are examined with new depth. There are also some minor writers who serve as attractive backround to, and greatly enrich, the larger story. In his final paragraphs, Keeley hints that he might have a first person narrative in store for us covering a subsequent generation of philhellene writers. Let's hope he makes good on this almost-promise.

An interesting book about Henry Miller/Lawrence Durrill and the "Generation of the Thirties"-Greek poets that include Seferis, and painters such as Ghikas.

The book is exactly what the NY Times calls it--a combination of literary history/critique, and cultural history. It tries to provide a deep understanding of the poetry from the decade before World War 2. It dispells the notion that Greece only has offered the world Homer & Pericles. Seferis, for example, won the Nobel Prize in Literature.

I've lost track of how many times I've read "Prospero's Cell." Durrell's use of metaphor and simile is at times brilliant; it is always interesting. Every time I return to "Prospero," I become Durrell's companion, walking the cobblestone streets, swimming in aquarium-clear waters, treading grapes. He has the finest understanding of Greek character I've ever seen in a non-Greek. His honest respect and affection are so real. The books of he and his brother Gerald ignited the mid-twentieth century tourist boom to Greece. Deservedly so!

Reviewed by David Lundberg, author of Olympic Wandering: Time Travel Through Greece

The setting for Shakespeare's "Tempest" is the Greek island of Corfu, argues one of the characters in this book, expounding on a deeply held belief of its author. The 'presiding genius' of Corfu, or as it was once called, Corcyra, is none other than Zeus Pantocrator.

For the readers of his island books, the genius of place is Lawrence Durrell.

According to the introduction by Carol Peirce (University of Baltimore, 1996), "Durrell composed "Prospero's Cell" as if it were a journal or diary of a year and a half on [Corfu]..." from April 1937 to September 1938, with a somber postscript from 1941 where he writes of friends already dead in the war. The war is a flat gray shadow, throwing the brilliance of Durrell's landscapes and dazzling Greek villages into intense relief. Reflections of a lost time are collected and focused through the genius of place--Durrell, himself.

Some of his most beautiful passages in "Prospero's Cell," indeed in all of his island books, take place under water. Here, the author goes carbide fishing one night:

"Presently the carbide lamp is lit and the whole miraculous under-world of the lagoon bursts into a hollow bloom...Transformed, like figures in a miracle, we gaze down upon a sea-floor drifting with its canyons and forests and families in the faint undertow of the sea--like a just-breathing heart."

Bright surfaces. Submerged longings. As Durrell floats in the blood-warm sea, he thinks, "One could die like this and wonder if it was death. The density, the weight and richness of a body without a mind or ghost to trouble it." This book is partly the landscape of Corcyra, and partly a landscape of dreams. There are stories of vampires, saints, and 'kallikanzaros,' which is a Greek term for little cloven-hooved satyrs, who cause mischief of every kind.

"Prospero's Cell" is one of a series of 'landscape books' that Durrell wrote about his pre- and post-war experiences in and around the Mediterranean. The other books in this series are "Reflections on a Marine Venus," "Spirit of Place," "Bitter Lemons," and "Sicilian Carousel."

Ultimately, these island books defy categorization. Durrell wrote about the peculiar genius of a place, not bound by any moment in time, but for all time.

This is a lovely piece of travel writing about the Island of Rhodes by a master observer of both the human character and the land- and seascapes with which Greece and its islands always delight us. It is a richly sensuous account of Durrell's years in the British civil service just after the end of WWII and just before the island is handed back to Greece. The eye is feted with descriptions of fields, hills, oranges and lemons, and flowers of every form and color. Sounds range from the rhythm of the sea (alternately savage and soothing) to Greek folk songs to sparkling conversation with Brit expatriates (including Gideon the half-sighted wonder). The author even offers a neat summation of a Greek picnic in tems of smells: petrol, garlic, wine and goat. Intermingled with these delicious attacks on the senses there is the play of light over the island as the sun moves across the sky and its rays are filtered through sea mist, mythology and the grim reality of having to rebuild a nation and an island after Nazi cruelty has left it a shambles. Like it or not, the reader is filled in on some mildly interesting points in the author's understanding of ancient history and the medieval Knights of St. John, who came into possession of the island for a time. The last section is about an enormous cookout in honor of a saint at whose shrine miracles have been know to occur, even raising the dead. It is a stroke of irony that during the festivities a young child is run over by a truck and dies the following day despite the best efforts of Mills, a good hearted but overextended British doctor. All in all, this is a delightful book, highly recommendable for those who enjoy travel writing. But Durrell is no Rebecca West, and this is not an example of the best Durrell. But it isn't bad Durrell, either.

Lawrence Durrell wrote this little book based on his life on Rhodes after World War II. This a more mature and settled Durrell than the young man who first brought us "Prospero's Cell" about Corfu or who wrote the "Alexandria Quartet" from Egypt during the war. Durrell's work is a time machine, taking the reader back to recovering Rhodes amidst poverty, sunshine, vibrant villages, and sparkling seas. His eye is fresh and clear, and his descriptions transport the reader to a place and time that are ageless and real. Another small classic!

Reviewed by David Lundberg, author of Olympic Wandering: Time Travel Through Greece

The book is a collection of letters, short works, and excerpts from larger works by Durrell. Of particular interest is 'Asylum in the Snow' & 'Zero', which were written around the time Durrell visited Henry Miller & Anäis Nin in Paris. The two short stories are remarkable for such a young writer, and give ample reason for T.S. Eliot's extremely high praise for Durrell. Feel free to email me to discuss this book.

Here we have a marvelous collection of short works by Lawrence Durrell that should satisfy both beginners and older Durrell addicts.

We all know that, as the most brilliant member of a brilliant family, LD had an enviably interesting life, living all over the globe for more or less long periods and reflecting deeply on what he observed. This volume shows that he also had a fascinating inner life -- of the mind, the soul, the spirit. Edited by Alan G. Thomas, it contains letters and articles along with excerpts from early works that show the writer had lots of star quality even as a young man, even if the world didn't come to know about it till The Alexandria Quartet.

Durrel seems to have been capable of a very wide range of emotions and feelings. Mostly he had a childlike (but not childish) sense of wonder at the world and the great diversity to be found among people of various nations and climates. Also central to his emotional life is his sense of compassion...this becomes clear in the short memoir about J. Gawsworth.

The letters -- to such figures as Freya Stark, Theoldore Stephamides, his agent Anne Ridler, and even T.S. Eliot, among others, are written from a variety of locales and offer insightful comments, especially comparative observations, on places and people. He tries to get to the heart of the notion of identity, what it means to a Frenchman, say, to be French, or Greekness to a Greek. He himself was not exactly taken with Argentina and he had no love at all for its people, whom he rightly describes as zombies. Of course he loved Greece above all nations and is proud to speak Greek fluently. He probably would have had many good things to say about Yugoslavia but the blight of Communist dictatorship colors his reaction to life in that sad country.

Like most persons of high and genuine refinement, he is hopelessly enamored of French culture and civilization. Some of the finest pieces in this book deal with French writers and artists (Stendhal is the preferred novelist and gets a lot of attention here). But Durrell is also interested in more mundane, everyday pursuits like wine production, studies at a university, and political allegiances.

Still, Durrells strongest, most enduring love is reserved for Greece and the Greek people among whom he lived for so many years. Especially touching is the piece where he describes his return to the Island of Corfu as an acclaimed writer after a twenty year absence only to discover that his old friends and neighbors, whose lives he had described so beautifully in his writings, have now become infected with materialism, commercialism and the profit motive, and they even want to capitalize on his fame. They suggest he come back to the village and live in his former house so they can get more money from the tourists by showing him off to them.

Yet the timeless beauty of the Greek people and the earthly paradise they inhabit comes shining forth in very many pages of this splendid book, which was editied and published during the writer's lifetime.