Lawrence Durrell Books

Our hero: a genius inventor living in Athens with a prostitute destined to murder her brother and become an international film star. His nemesis: Julian, suave & shadowy head of a huge multinational firm out for global domination ... and our hero's soul! His lover: Benedicta, Merlin Industries' fabulously wealthy heiress. Raised in a Turkish seraglio, she spends her days falconing in the hills above Istanbul ...

Improbable? You bet! Half the fun of this book is the B-movie TechniColor melodrama that Durrell lays on with trowel in hand and tongue almost certainly in cheek. What saves this from being a Grisham-style potboiler (fun in its own way) is the suspicion that Durrell doesn't believe in the plot any more than you do: the whole show's just a vehicle for his ideas. The shifting combination of doubles that each character pairs with in the story's weird geometry hints at the concept that everyone in the novel might just be an aspect of the same binary consciousness. The narrative style too--which loops and reloops languidly from past to present, then swoops in a flash to a climax, like one of Benedicta's falcons--tips you off that the workings of memory and the subjective sense of time it brings to our fragile notion of reality are as much a concern to Durrell as any of the events that unfold in his exotic & highly artificial world.

By today's standards, Durrell's prose is more than a little purple; that his women are basically walking dummies and his Orient the perverse, decadent hothouse of the British imperialist also marks "Tunc" as the relic of another era. But if you liked the "Alexandria Quartet" and want to recapture some of the magic, this book should fill a few pleasant afternoons.

P.S. "Tunc" forms a pair with "Nunquam"--both part of Durrell's "Revolt of Aphrodite" series--and each makes more sense if you read it in conjunction with the other.

In a similar manner that The Alexandrian Quartet concentrates on the responsibility and the struggle of the individual artist, Tunc (meaning next in Latin) represents the scientist. Told in typical flashes of memory, the story describes the induction of a gifted scientist, Felix, into Merlin, the mysterious and very powerful firm that everybody seems to be a part of. He soon finds himself married to the ill Merlin heiress, Benedicta, and recipient of limitless wealth. As Benedicta becomes more and more tempestuous and suffers more and more psychological damage, Felix feels a new yearning for his scientific freedom. Something, whether it be the never seen chairman of Merlin, Julian, or the firm itself is always a step ahead of him. Told with the same linguistic perfection of Durrell's other novels, Tunc gracefully unfolds itself into the reader's comprehension. Nothing is revealed before it ought to be and the reader is kept with just enough information to follow the story, but no more. It is definatly worth reading.

Durrell's much under-rated poetry finds full amplitude in this Aleandria, the rebuilt library of ancients populated by the wandering rocks of people and emotions. In our current era of stark prose and text messaged sentiments, Durrell will prove to be a heavy read, as laborous as the timepiece hearts he documents, and all of their weird, irrational gears and gyres.

Durrell's eye for cosmopolitanism is brilliant: the religions, languages, and daily chores of different cultures teem throughout his work -- never feeling like some cultural backdrop summoned up as window dressing, but as a anthropological landscape of comings and goings. The themes surface simply and poignantly: desire, regret, and the price one pays for age and indifference, "sad, like studying an old passport." With Joyce's attention to language, and Kazantzakis's ethos of passion, Durrell delivers one of the most memorable sweeps of language I have ever come across.

See, an editor may read this book and want to take the red pen to smear it: verbose, self-indulgent, dreamy, weepy, precocious . . . hardly the lean craft of today's novels. Perhaps that why I love this book so much: the backgammon chauvinism, the "Judeo-coptic analysis", a real labyrinth choked with dusk, dust, and unacknowledged heros. Maybe word processors have ruined our ability to observe. I don't know. But with Durrell I got a real magic carpet ride; the price of admission was patience. But this work thrilled me in a way few do. The varied emotional timbre soar out so exquisitely . . . like when I heard Antony & the Johnsons cover "Knocking on Heaven's Door". The lyrics were well known to me, to you . . . but the quiet vocal shock of the voice was what threw me. Durrell's like this. And unlike the sagging drunks of so many authors I admire, he keeps his addictions fresh and summery. I imagine him even now, with Homer, wearing a woolen boatman's cap, murmurring the names of islands, grinning. That's my kind of novelist.

With "Justine", Lawrence Durrell set out to the task of producing the novel matching his times. He wanted "The Alexandria Quartet" to be based on the relativity principle as much as the great authors of the generation before, like Proust, explored the theory of Bergson. According to Durrell, all four parts are to be read as parallel, he call them "siblings" not "sequels", and the separation in space and point of view is used here, rather than the time sequence. He succeeded in producing a work of remarkable, unique quality.

With that in mind, I started reading "Justine", planning to read the whole tetralogy.
At the beginning, we meet the narrator, an aspiring writer, who lives in seclusion on a remote Greek island with his lover's two-year old daughter. He embarks on a quest to reconstruct his recent past in the Egyptian, mysterious multi-national city, Alexandria, which had enormous impact on his life and which is still haunting him.

While in Alexandria, the narrator, a financially struggling schoolteacher, despite his poverty is a friend and acquaintance of people from a vast variety of social background. His lover, Melissa, is a mediocre dancer in a strip-tease club; his friends include the diplomat Pombal, the Jewish doctor-Cabbalist Balthazar, Scobie, the retired policeman involved in secret service, the rich Copt Nessim and - most importantly - Nessim's wife, Justine, a character central to the story in this volume.

Justine, a prototypical femme fatale, is a dark character, a woman who is unhappy and searching happiness through others, and although unfailingly attractive to men, she cannot find what she is looking for. She is intelligent and instinctive at the same time; lustful, crossing all the barriers, but also inhibited and broken by the trauma from her childhood. And, as a femme fatale, she brings only unhappiness to those who love her and many others...

The narrator, in love with Justine despite his friendship for Nessim and love (oh, how many kinds of love exist out there?) for Melissa, is intrigued by her so that in an effort to know her better he collects all bits and pieces of information about her from his own and Justine's old friends, peruses the novel written by Arnauti, Justine's ex-husband, with many quotations throughout the text, looks thorough the diaries and letter. The resulting patchwork does not really get him any closer to the heart of the mystery, the puzzle only seems to be solved. In addition, a story parallel to the tragic love entanglements, involving a secret Kabbalah organization and the spy network, complicates the plot even farther and adds more unexplained facts, speculations and imagined solutions.

Alexandria itself is probably the most important "character" in the novel - the protagonists wander the streets like in a dream during long, hot nights in the city's suffocating atmosphere. The international, multi-faith mix of inhabitants, including, Greeks, Arabs, Jews and European immigrants attracted by the unique lifestyle, produced an unique environment, where Orient and Occident come together, adding to the ancient tradition and Hellenistic culture visible in every corner and the decadency typical for the described period between two world wars. The group of protagonists (none of them exactly central, except, in this part, Justine, who unites them all in the unhappy knot of events) display a strange balance between heart and brain, some prove to be cynical and cerebral, others emotional to the point of absurdity, other switching between animal instinct and analytical mind. The climax, a death, is a point when all the connections seem to fall apart or be deliberately broken, but there is no catharsis, and the characters, although physically separated, still live in their own internal hell, tormented by the past. This kind of ending is very clever, because it provides both the perfect roundup to the story and the encouragement for the reader to get on with the next volumes.

The language matches the plot - it is lush and meaty, fabulously rich in great psychological portraits, descriptions of the landscapes, moods and the city. All the wording is adequate and the frequent quotations (from the Alexadrian Greek poet, Constantine Cavafy) magnificently complement the whole of the novel. I am surprised that, although apparently considered for the Nobel Prize, Durrell finally did not get it, because a work like "The Alexandria Quartet" undoubtedly deserves it.

Justine is another poetry/prose hybrid in the vein of Under the Volcano, or To the Lighthouse. It will not be everyone's cup of tea--it certainly wasn't mine, and if I had not been to Alexandria, and decided to read every book on the MLA 100, I would have tossed it.

There's a fine line between pretentiously turgid and truly remarkable writing, and Durrell skates across it numerous times throughout the work. This book is a very creditable achievement, but it does not scale the heights of a masterpiece like Under the Volcano...a novel that accomplishes in toto what Durrell manages to do only about seventy-five percent of the time.

I recommend the book on aesthetic, intellectual grounds, but nothing else. (Except for Scobie's euphemism for Jews...a real laugh-out-louder.)

Half-way through this book, I must confess, I was about to put it aside as hopelessly esoteric and self-indulgent. But the last 100 pages began to take a different character, and by the time I came to the great duck hunt (an almost Tolstoyan set piece that contains the main action of the novel), I couldn't put it down. And I found myself so moved by the brief final section, which bids a temporary farewell to the more important characters, that I went straight to the bookstore to buy the other three novels that make up Durrell's ALEXANDRIA QUARTET. Now fifty pages into BALTHAZAR, the second of them, I feel as though a landscape previously endured under a haze of oppressive heat has been revealed in fresh light under a clear blue sky.

THE ALEXANDRIA QUARTET came out in paperback at about the time I was entering university, and my friends and I bought the first volume or two, probably in the hope that reading such an erudite work would brand us as card-carrying intellectuals, besides being all about sex. I rather think we failed to get beyond a few dozen pages, and were certainly disappointed in the sex. Though Durrell chose Alexandria for its polyglot decadence: "Five races, five languages, a dozen creeds; five fleets turning through their greasy reflections behind the harbour bar. But there are more than five sexes and only demotic Greek seems to distinguish between them." He stirs a potent cocktail that includes most of those races and languages. Although the later books seem less opaque, JUSTINE assumes that the reader can handle expressions in Arabic, quotations in Latin, and sometimes whole exchanges in French; even its English vocabulary sent me several times to the dictionary ("banausic" anyone?). Reading the books now, I am amazed at the degree of sophistication that even a highbrow author could assume of his readers in the 1950s, though I suspect that Durrell always intended to give the impression of superior knowledge; that remark about demotic Greek is surely just showing off.

Certainly sex is everywhere in Durrell's Alexandria, in many different forms, gay or straight, for payment and without. But, as compared to his friend and former house-mate, Durrell was much less interested in describing the physical aspects. His main theme in JUSTINE is the apparent separation of sex from friendship on the one hand and spiritual love on the other. His various flavors of half-fidelities and adulteries would have meant little to us at that age. But they do ring more true when one understands more of the blind alleys and detours we allow ourselves to tread in the search for some elusive ideal. JUSTINE is one of the least titillating erotic books I can imagine, but its pervasive sadness can shade into sympathy and even wisdom.

I returned to JUSTINE immediately after reading another novel written by a poet: DIVISADERO by Michael Ondaatje (whose ENGLISH PATIENT also contains scenes of adulterous love in Egypt at almost the same period). But the two writers are very different; Ondaatje's language works by paragraphs or pages; Durrell's at the level of the individual word or phrase. Ondaatje paints pictures which separate themselves from the words that evoked them. With Durrell, however, pictures, characters, ideas are all subsumed in the same perfumed language; his is an intoxicating voice; you either walk out on it or surrender. But he is good; listen to his description of a lake at dusk: "When the engines of the hydroplanes are turned off the silence is suddenly filled with groaning and gnatting of duck." And again at dawn: "And on all sides now comes the rich plural chuckle of duck and the shrill pitched note of the gulls to the seaboard." The opening of the next book, BALTHAZAR, gives an even better idea of his extraordinary use of words, highly-colored but verging on the over-ripe:

"Landscape tones: brown to bronze, steep skyline, low cloud, pearl ground with shadowed oyster and violet reflections. The lion-dust of desert: prophets' tombs turned to zinc and copper at sunset on the ancient lake. Its huge sand-faults like watermarks from the air; green and citron giving to gunmetal, to a single plum-dark sail, moist, palpitant: sticky-winged nymph. Taposiris is dead among its tumbling columns and seamarks, vanished the Harpoon Men . . . Mareotis under a sky of hot lilac."

Durrell's language is both the brilliance of the book and its greatest liability. Elsewhere, he writes disparagingly of a journalist whose profession had "trained him to stay on the superficies of real life (acts and facts about acts)." With Durrell (as with Proust, surely his spiritual mentor), acts and facts are revealed sparingly and told out of sequence; the important action is all internal. But from whose perspective? When all language is equally charged, the only inner life that comes through clearly is that of the unnamed wordsmith. Or are we hearing the voice of the city, with the narrator as its mouthpiece? Perhaps. Alexandria is intoxicating, but enervating. The part of the book that I find truly moving is at the very end, when many of the characters have left. Justine in Palestine, Clea in Syria, Nessim returning from Kenya, the narrator en route to self-imposed exile on a lonely Greek island -- these few rain-washed glimpses suddenly make me care enough about them as people to read the next book, and the next, and the next.

Those who require a book - or series of books - to have a strong, always-moving-forwards, "plot" are understandably frustrated by The Alexandria Quartet. Durrell himself noted that he saw the four books as simply visions of the same complex web of events and people filtered through different perceptions. It is a glittering, multi-dimensional, spiderlike construction of links and mini-scenes, that is given into your hands to look into, to turn a little this way and that, with each viewpoint affording new glimpses down intricate pathways of place, time, and persons. As you explore, you are hand-held by the most amazing use of language to keep you perpetually involved, both in scene descriptions and in meditative thoughts and aphorisms.

So many extraordinary moments and sayings: all ultimately concerned with the nature of relationship, of trust, of acceptance of things as they are, not as they should be. There are painful discoveries: but is there really such a thing as betrayal when everything acts according to its ineluctable nature? Yet pain is real: how devastating are Justine's words "Who invented the human heart, I wonder? Tell me, and then show me the place where he was hanged."

For the marvelous brief portraits - what to choose - How about a quick first view of the dark and enigmatic Justine: "...Justine's lovely head - the deep bevel of that Arabian nose and those translucent eyes, enlarged by belladonna. She gazed about her like a half-trained panther." But then a different perspective: "Later, going to bed, she would catch sight of herself in the mirror on the first landing and say to her reflection: "Tiresome pretentious hysterical Jewess that you are!"

Or the slightly sinister portrait of Capodistria: "He is more of a goblin than a man, you would think. The flat triangular head of the snake with the huge frontal lobes: the hair grows forward in a widow's peak. A whitish flickering tongue is forever busy keeping his thin lips moist."

Or the city itself: "Alexandria Main Station: midnight. A deathly heavy dew. The noise of wheels cracking the slime-slithering pavements. Yellow pools of phosphorous light, and corridors of darkness like tears in the dull brick façade of a stage set. Policemen in the shadows."

I don't know how to convey the unique flavor of "Justine" and the others except by giving these mini-tastes. I think you will probably be able to determine from them if these are books for you. They certainly are for me - have been for many years.

This is a wonderfully poetic, sophisticated, and learned story of the isle of Corfu as experienced by Lawrence Durrell during a two-year idyll there in 1937 and 1938. Durrell was young (mid-twenties), he was still married to the first of his four wives, Corfu was beautiful and unspoiled, life there had changed little for generations, and World War II was yet to come. (When it did erupt, Durrell remained on Corfu until the fall of Greece, but he does not date any of the entries in this book, save the last, later than 1938.) Durrell wrote the book in 1945. Thus, it is scarcely surprising that there is a distinct sense of nostalgia, that the book is almost elegaic for a Corfu that, in 1938, was still a place out of time -- but by 1945, who knew? And we, reading it 60 years later, know all to well that globalistic forces have overwhelmed the Corfus of the world.

The book proceeds gracefully back and forth among anecdotes about Durrell's life on Corfu and his circle of friends there (all of whom are true characters and quite engaging); tales of history, mythology, and folklore; evocative descriptions of the land and sea; accounts of local practices and customs and livelihoods (principally fishing); snapshots of the Greeks as a people; philosophizing; and on and on. Throughout the writing is leisurely and superb. I compiled a lengthy list of striking quotes, but here I will limit myself to several examples.

On the Greeks: "The loquacity, the shy cunning, the mendacity, the generosity, the cowardice and bravery, the almost comical inability of self-analysis." Or, "We Greeks are not religious, we are superstitious and anarchic. Even death is less important than politics."

On land and sea: "The little bay lies in a trance, drugged with its own extraordinary perfection -- a conspiracy of light, air, blue sea, and cypresses. The rock faces splinter the light and reflect it both upward and downward; so that, staring through the broken dazzle of the Ionian sun, the quiet bather in his boat can at the same time look down into three fathoms of water with neither rock nor weed to interrupt the play of imagination . . .."

On local customs (and on time): "Not that time itself is anything more than a word here. Peasant measurement of time and distance is done by cigarettes. Ask a peasant how far a village is and he will reply, nine times out of ten, that it is a matter of so many cigarettes."

PROSPERO'S CELL (the title comes from speculation that Corfu was Prospero's island in Shakespeare's "The Tempest") is often classified as a travel book, but that doesn't really do it justice. It is virtually sui generis. If you are going to spend some time on Corfu, by all means read it (in addition to your Fodor's or other generic "travel guide"). But even if you are not fortunate enough to have been to or be going to Corfu, or even if you do not normally enjoy "travel books", you may very well luxuriate in this literate, sophisticated, and poetic book of a place and time that are no more. It is a splendid gem.

... this book is probably excellent. Poetic at times, amusing at others, and funny almost always, it's a good read and a nice introduction into the landscapes and people of Corfu. You get to know Zarian, Nicholas, N., and the rest of the uncanny people that seemed to be the expatriate tribe in Corfu at the time.
However (I wouldn't have given it 3 stars if there weren't a "however"), that's not always what you're looking for in a travel book. If you're into Theroux, you'll probably find this book boring at times, too intent on seeking brilliant metaphors.

The English writer Lawrence Durrell spent four years on the island of Corfu together with his first wife Nancy Myers in the years 1935-1939. He has collected his memoirs on this period during his staying in Alexandria during the WWII.

Prospero's Cell evades genre classification. It is an autobiography, but not a particularly factual one - for instance, along with Lawrence and Nancy, the whole Durrell family - his mother, two brothers and sister - came to live on Corfu for the same period, a fact he only acknowledges in a passing remark or two. It is written in a form of a diary, but the story flows without paying any attention on the interpunctuating dates. It claims to be a guide to the landscape and manners of the island of Corfu, but is useless as such. It spends a considerable time discussing the history and myths concerning Corfu, but the material is not laid out in a systematic and scholarly manner, and is probably of low value as a historical text.

Apart from ephemeral characters, the four personae make out the main cast: apart from Lawrence and his wife, there is also a doctor, biologist and polymath, Dr. Theodore Stephanides, and a bohemian Armenian journalist, Ivan Zarian. (Both are actual persons, of course; apart from here, Stephanides also appears on Gerald Durrell's My Family and Other Animals, and Henry Miller's The Colossus of Maroussi.) However, Durrell has taken the liberty to interrupt occasionally this chronicle of their living, their thoughts etc. with a treatise on the Saint Spiridon, the island patron; or Karaghiosis, the puppet theatre hero; or a long treatise on the island history and myths concerning it. Prospero's cell ends with "some peasant remedies in common use against disease", a "synoptic history of the island of Corfu", lists of places to see, things to visit etc., and finally concludes with an anthology of letters written by Edward Lear, an English painter who spent on Corfu several years in mid-19th century.

Durrel's language is like brocade: rich, heavy and very sophisticated. He is too serene and spiritual to talk humour, even when the topic is indeed funny, e.g. the accident with the Corfu fire brigade, the Zarian's obsession with "Mantinea 1936" and the Stephanides' confusion with the brain cutlets, he merely cites the narrator. Still, it is a nice holiday reading, an intellectual supplement to any *real* guide to Corfu you happen to take with you. And, while you are there, don't forget to get yourself Hilary Whitton Paipeti's guide, In the Footsteps of Lawrence Durrell and Gerald Durrell in Corfu (1935-39), which will help you connect the world of Durrells with the contemporary Corfu.

William Durrell's investigation of modern love in THE ALEXANDRIA QUARTET announced the author's interest in blending geography and metaphysics, which probably originates in his Indian heritage.

The Corfu that the British author knew in 1936-7 might have disappeared already, yet his romantic portrayal of Mediterranean culture captures the spirit that despite inevitable historic changes and the ravashes of modernisation still prevails on the coasts of this historic sea. The bittersweet mixture of melancholy and happiness that is at the soul of everything Mediterranean, and even his philosophical reflections are impregnated with the soft sensualism in which the Mediterranean tradition of tolerance and antiquity is embodied.

PROSPERO'S CELL was published in 1945, four years after the author had left the island, and thus the nostalgia that pervades his writing further contributes to the beauty of this book. Some narrative chapters seem far-fetched in their anglicising romanticism, like the moonlight discussions on "Greekness" with the rich and bohemian Count D., but still Durrell's passionate portrayal of Greece should help enliven some rainy winter afternoons.

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

For those like myself who know Durrell mainly through reading the 'Alexandria Quartet' this work will be a surprise. All the complex ambiguities the poetic language and the endless confusing of identities which inform the 'Quartet' are absent here. Instead we have fine, precise, workable prose, careful descriptions of landscape, and character. Durrell here takes a 'group tour' with an odd- band of multinationals who at first show slight repugnance towards each other, but who end up , if not in deep lasting friendship, but in pleasurable acquaintance. But the major character of the work aside from Durrell is a former friend of his who he knew in Crete many years ago. Her thoughts and observations comprise a good share of what is on Durrell's mind. Nonetheless his historical sense of Sicily, his ability to perceive at different times and through different visistor's eyes are a principal pleasure of the book. Also Durrell's love of the Mediterranean and his real feeling for the culture in its various aspects. His sense of the beauty of its nature is strong, and his writing on the flora especially nice. There is a mildness in the whole adventure. It is not a bold exploration to a distant unknown land, but rather a childlike spin around an often - visited place.
Durrell's great intelligence and his feeling for the little foible which makes each character special inform this work, and make a truly pleasurable read.
Just for the feel and the fun here is a sample of Durrell's writing, this on the great Mediterranean tree, the olive.
"The hardiness of the tree is proverbial, it seems to live without water, though it responds readily to moisture and to fertiliser when available. But it will stand heat to an astonishing degee and keep the beauty of its grey- silver leaf. The root of the tree is a huge grenade- its proportions astonish those who see dead trees being extracted like huge molars. Quite small specimens have roots the size of pianos.Then the trimmings make excellent kindling and the wood burns so swiftly and so ardently that bakers like to start up their ovens with it. It has other virtues also; it can be worked and has a beautiful grain when carved and oiled. Of the fruit it is useless to speak unless it be to extol its properties, and the Greek poets have not faulted the job. It's a thrifty tree and a hardy one. It has a delicate moment during the brief flowering period when a sudden turn of wind or snow can prejudice the blossom and thus the fruit. But it is a tree which grows on you when you live with it, and when the north wind turns it inside out- from grey green to silver - one can imagine with accuracy the exact shade of Athena's smiling eyes."

It is prose passages like this and perhaps less the examples of Durrell's own poetry which he includes in the volume which do give a sense of what a strong poetic writer Durrell can be, when at his best.

I got this book in preparation for a similar bus tour I was scheduled to take around Sicily. But while Durrell always promised himself he would write a "pocket guide" to Sicily - this isn't it. This book is about almost everything but Sicily.

Oh, it gives some of the atmospherics of the Island. And it conveys a sense of how profoundly Greek the Island is. But beyond that, there isn't much of the modern Sicily here. And there is almost nothing about the place that Durrell cites as having personally attracted him, almost nothing that he recommends to those with a similar temperament. He carried away few unique insights from his junket.

Most of this book is a reminiscence about Durrell's friendship with a deceased woman named "Martine" - and about their days together on other islands, mostly Cyprus. There is a lot of somewhat abstruse reference to Greek mythology, a lot of showy erudition here. But again, where is the living Sicily in all this?

It is interesting to read Durrell's account of his friendship. Although it took place just a few decades ago, it almost seems as if it must have taken place in another time altogether, on another planet. Rarely does a man so take to heart a woman's character and ideas. Rarely does a man quote a woman, as Durrell quotes Martine here - re-reading her letters to him, recalling her every turn of phrase, her interests. So the book is worthwhile on that account, because of the way it holds out hope for real intellectual friendship between a man and a woman.

But I repeat one more time - where is Sicily? If like me, you are looking for a personal guide to that Island, you might do better to just stick with Rick Steves.

"Sicilian Carousel" (1976) is the fourth and final 'landscape book' that Durrell wrote about his travels in and around the Mediterranean. The other books in this series are "Prospero's Cell," "Reflections on a Marine Venus," and "Bitter Lemons." This volume was published almost two decades after "Bitter Lemons" and Durrell is a much more mellow writer--perhaps because of his retirement from various posts within the British Foreign Office. Or perhaps because no one was shooting at him on Sicily.

Martine, who was a friend of Durrell's on Cyprus ("Bitter Lemons") is a ghostly presence on Sicily, the largest and perhaps the most beautiful of the Mediterranean islands. She had tried to persuade her friend to visit her in life. Instead, he brings her letters to Sicily and shares Martine's favorite places with her in death. He compares her "to a sea-bird who has floated out of sight" and spends the book trying to lay her ghost.

I would not have expected this author to sign up for a packaged tour. In fact, he states: "I had begun to think that my decision to join the Carousel [tour group] was utterly mad. I shall loathe the group, I feel it. I was not made for group travel." But here he is chasing his ghost around Sicily in a little red bus with an eccentric, multinational bunch of tourists, including a British prep-school master accused of pederasty.

I suppose there's always someone like Beddoes in every tour group--someone who loves jokes about flatulence, has lousy table manners, and pries unashamedly into his fellow-travelers' lives. "Later of course we were to ask God plaintively in our prayers what we had done to merit such a traveling companion."

Durrell finally reconciles himself to Beddoes, even loans him money and scatters his clothes about the crater of Mount Etna when Beddoes decides to fake a suicide and change his identity.

At the end of the tour, the author bumps into an old friend of Martine's in Taormina, and together they listen to a tape of her at a party. It's not so much that Durrell was mourning Martine as it was that he felt she had eluded him. Now, at journey's end, he can finally reconcile himself with her ghost. "I had, in a manner of speaking, recovered contact with Martine. It was reassuring to feel that she was, in a sense, still there, still bright in the memory of her friends."

Indeed, as Durrel in these island books is still bright in the memory of his readers.

I think of this book as 'Durrell Lite'. While Durrell's language is as magisterial and richly evocative as always, reading his account of a package tour of Sicily is a bit like going to hear Pavarotti sing in a small high school auditorium with poor lighting. There just isn't enough scope for his vast powers of observation within the confines of this brief, hurried tour. Instead of colorful locals, for example, Durrell gives us cranky, mostly English tourists, inconveniently falling ill in cramped hotels. If only he had gone to Sicily on his own, to spend a summer or a year, what a different book this might have been!

In his 1977 account of a bus tour of Sicily, Sicilian Carousel, Lawrence Durrell says "all the characters in this volume are imaginary." In some sense it is a novel about Martine, a friend on Cyprus who lived in Sicily and often urged the narrator to visit Sicily. The narrator is guided by and confirms many of her analyses of places and histories and also portrays an international cast of fellow travelers (a French couple with a child, a Japanese couple, and various English types). What the narrator and Martine write is mostly perspicacious both about Sicily and about traveling. Reading the book is like joining the conversation between Martine and the narrator about Sicily and seems a better book to read after one has some experience of the island to compare to the impressions of the now-dead Durrell and the long-dead Martine.

(The occasional poems are underwhelming, though I like the line "They also die who only sit and wait.")

Despite the glut of misinformation which has been printed about Lawrence Durrell (such as the editorial review attached to the book here), Ian MacNiven has written an amazingly well-rounded and very thorough academic biography of one of our century's most influential and important authors. MacNiven provides a highly readable account of Durrell's varied life, excellent for both the scholar and the general reader. Moreover, he handles the myths surrounding Durrell both honestly and without sensationalism. Among these would be the allegations of incest alluded to as fact in the editorial above; allegations which were made posthumously (for both father and daughter) by the *publicist* selling his daughter's journals just after the release of Nin's "Incest." Noteably, these allegations do not appear in the publication; something which would make the academic biographer -- as opposed to the Hollywood biographer -- cover the material with greater care to accuracy. This is not to say that MacNiven treads lightly over other socially problematic areas. He unabashedly details questions involving Durrell's personal treatment of women, his role in British colonialism and his 'adventurous' love life, among many others. This is an excellent biography to read on its own -- ranging through colonial India, Greece, Egypt and France -- but perhaps it will serve a better purpose if it draws readers back to Durrell's own texts, notably the "Alexandria Quartet," "Prospero's Cell" or his masterpiece, the "Avignon Quintet" - which is still very much available in Canada and the UK. Please feel free to email me to discuss this book or Durrell's works.

Lawrence Durrell's biography fails to tell us why he seemed to be a British writer who mattered ,for a brief time only.An enormous book tells us little or nothing of his work on behalf of Britain, as a PR man, a spy, even a propagandist in odd places such as the middle of the Argentine pampas .Durrell is said to have produced books that are now almost incomprehensible--the Alexandria Quartet. Perhaps it was all a joke .What is all the hoo-haw about then ? Why a biography about a man who seems mean spirited and humorless.The writer fails to bring Durrell to life and never explains why this writer's books were once praised to the sky.Pass this one by.

Although I was blown away by the energy and effort put into it, my praise for this monumental work owes to something else: Despite being one of the most influential authors of our century, Durrell is a person that one would be tempted to take vicious swipes at. His life provides ample ammunition to the self-righteous. He is someone whom you would be inclined to hate rather than to love. But the eager critic should not forget that both the man and his life were brutal to each other. After January 1st, 1967 his life was a drawn-out tragedy until the end, a tragedy that only those who've lost a most beloved wife can understand. In the end, Durrell was a man who needed love more than most of us. He seemed to be getting too much of it during his life, but to him it was probably never enough. And that is what makes this book praiseworthy, to my opinion: Through this meticulously composed volume, whose first draft is said to have been twice as large as what was eventually printed, the author has demonstrated his courage to love a man that many have chosen to hate; ain't no matter that he did it posthumously.

MacNiven's new biography of another of the bad boys of English literature reveals the torment and the genius of Lawrence Durrell. For anyone who believes the sexual revolution didn't begin until the Sixties, this book will be an eye-opener. In the style of contemporary biography MacNiven covers a myriad of detail yet the book is never boring, perhaps because Durrell himself was never boring. Contentious, abusive, drunken, humorous, talented, complex, depressive, yes but never dull. This is not a sensationalist biography. The author was the subject's friend - the project was offered to him - and a certain respect is evident even in the passages that cover some of the more dubious aspects of Durrell's life. Durrell knew some of the great literary figures of the 20th century including Henry Miller, T.S. Eliott, Anais Nin, and he lived through some of the most interesting times. His books are rich in a sense of place, the descriptions of Cyprus, of Alexandria, of Provence convey the smells, the sounds, the heat and the cold. A good companion to this biography is Spirit of Place, a collection of Durrell's letters and essays, many of which are quoted from here. Lawrence Durrell seems to have slipped slightly from fashion, a fact he would no doubt find amusing, as long as enough money continued to come in. Perhaps this biography will help to rekindle an interest in his books, especially the Alexandrian Quartet and Bitter Lemons, probably his least obscure prose.

I have been a fan of Lawrence Durrell for
50 years and finding this book is wonderful.
Fast shipment; great condition; nice vendor

The Lawrence Durrell Reader is a compendium of his best travel writing. All the entries concern the Mediterranean World and particularly its islands--Corfu, Rhodes, Cyprus and Sicily, with Provence and Delphi thrown in for continental balance. The collection celebrates what Durrell liked to call "Spirit of Place." It may seem occasionally dated as we move into the final decadance of condominium development. It may seem nostalgic in an age where beachfront hotels supply "animation" for its patrons. But from the exuberance of Prospero's Cell to the sadness of Bitter Lemons, Durrell will tell you everything you need to know about the places he looked for in himself.


Less Than a Shadow

Gordon Bowker's Through the Dark Labyrinth is a biography of the British author, Lawrence Durrell. Like Durrell's other major biographer, Ian MacNiven, Bowker discusses the charge that Durrell committed incest with his daughter, Sappho. Like MacNiven, Bowker regards the charge as unproven. He points out that Sappho did not make a specific charge against her father in her journals concerning physical incest, but rather spoke there (and elsewhere)of "mental" or "psychological" incest. This does not mean that Bowker defends Durrell's mean-spirited and psychologically damaging behavior toward Sappho (and many others). But it does mean that Bowker--like MacNiven--refrains from sensationalistic accusations. Durrell's behavior toward his daughters, wives, lovers, and friends sheds a lot of light on the creation of his great, four-novel opus, The Alexandria Quartet, as well as on his other works, in particular his last giant work, the Avignon Quintet. In many of his novels, Durrell is obsessed with incest as well as death, time, and the relativity of knowledge. He thought truly great thoughts, and Bowker, like MacNiven, discusses them very well. It ought to be possible to separate Durrell's ideas and art from the less appealing aspects of his personality, just as we separate Wagner's great music from his proto-Nazi ideas. Bowker helps us do this, especially in regards to the charge of incest.

Gordon Bowker's biography of Durrell is an easy read and has plenty of references to Durrell's 'dark side' to satisfy the reader who is looking for pure entertainment. As an academic biography it is hindered by not being able to quote from Durrell's own works or from unpublished materials, since it was released very shortly before the more thorough official biography. Moreoever the attention to accuracy is not nearly as close as that of Ian MacNiven's work (the official biography), and Bowker has a tendency toward omitting important details which would alter to 'glamour' of the biography. One such point of difference is the allegations of incest which were posthumously levelled against Durrell and his daughter by the *publicist* for his deceased daughter's journals. Noteably, these journals do not contain this allegation and were being published in the wake of Nin's "Incest". Bowker treats these as fact, despite the problems involved, & does not reveal that the allegations were not made by the daughter nor that the 'friend' who made them had waited ten years before raising the issue (which surely helped publicity). Bowker's biography is fun and popular, but for accuracy, detail and literary merit Ian MacNiven's new biography "Lawrence Durrell; A Biography" is a far better value. Nonetheless, anyone interesting in Durrell's works would benefit from both. Feel free to email me to discuss this book.

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.

Durrell's long experience in the region allowed him to discuss many of the more obscure aspects of Provence and its history. It is part history, part memoir, part poetry.

The book should be read for its value as entertainment and to gain a sense of Provence & its history, but I do not feel that it would be a suitable source of accurate historical information. Upon furhter investigation of many events that Durrell talks about, I discovered that he presented only one side of a situation about which there is no current consensus or agreement among academics/historians.

Finally, I found the last chapter of the book quite bizarre, and admit that I got very little out of it.

Citing the above qualifications, I recommend this book for those interested in Provence (with the added bonus that Durrell's writing is a thing enjoyable in itself).

As good as anything Durrell wrote in The Alexandria Quartet. Monsieur is the first book in his Avignon Quintet--Livia, Constance, Sebastian, and Quinx are the others. Nearly all of these are out of print and not so easy to find. If you can get them from Amazon it is probably the best way to go. If you like going back in time to other worlds where ghosts and knights and gnostics and drugs all come together in mansions somewhere along the Nile, then this is the book for you.