_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.

Forget all those insipid Peter Mayle books and the myriad imitations that they spawned. This is the real thing; a book about settling in a new country, buying a house (the funniest chapter in the book) and the slow realisation that, politically, the situation is becoming untenable. Bitter Lemons, which starts off so optimistically, is a sad commentary on the inability of people to get along with each other. Take this book away with you this summer and Mr Durrell's unique ability to evoke the Spirit of Place (see his collected letters) will stay with you and haunt you long after you return home from your tame vacation on the beach.

recently read Bitter Lemons which was chosen for a book discussion group. Especially enjoyed the scene when Durrell & his "associate local lawyer" make the deal to purchase his house and the negotiations that go on to remodel it.

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!

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.

Mountolive is a welcome new point of view on the events, after Justine and Balthazar. It helped me put things together before I read Clea. I can even say that I found it 'refreshing'. Next time I read The Quartet (and I surely will), I might begin with this book.

As I read the second of Durrell's Alexandria Quartet, I first looked for another focus. (I had been so impressed with the watercolor decriptions of the first.) In the beginning of the novel, I thought Durrell had decided to be more desciptive in the area of sounds and thought he had impishly personified this goal with a focus on a strange talking parrot.

However, I was soon drawn into the story. I forget my efforts at intellectualizing and found that the characters had broadened for me. I wanted to read about what was happening to them and what had happened to them. I found myself changed from a distant observer into one who empathized with the characters. I noticed that I had been jealous of Justine in the first novel and found myself happy that she was no longer worshipped in the second novel.

Durrell's desciptions went past lush and ripe into fascinating, fermenting, and magnetic. Intrigue is introduced. Other sides of incidents are shown. I loved this book and intend to read the other two in the series.

Sometimes I get the impression that Durrell had a life time stash of pithy quotes he just had to get worked in somewhere. In this book he has an addendum titled "Consequential Data." Don't miss these. For example, "Gamblers and lovers always play to lose."

The second book of the Alexandrian Quartet mirrors all the happenings in the first, only this time from Balthazar's perspective. Beautifully written, this books gives the characters more depth than the naive and intellectual Darley first perceived. Here the complexities of love and obsession are seen in the light of curiosity, not rationalism.

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.

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.

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.

The 'marine Venus' of the title is a statue which was found by sailors in their nets at the bottom of Rhodes harbor and which much appealed to Durrell, who thought of her as the 'presiding genius' of the place. He began this book while assigned to Rhodes as an information officer in 1945, and finally finished it in Belgrade in 1952 while working as a press attaché for the British Embassy. Before publication, it was chopped almost in half by his editor, Anne Ridler. She excised most of the passages dealing with the recent war, and "left the descriptions of the landscape and people....She oriented the book to sunlight, blue skies, and clear sea." [quoted from the introduction David Roessel].

War still clings like a gray film to the bright fabric of 'Venus.' Durrell writes intense, brilliant descriptions of Mediterranean skies and dazzling Greek villages, but as in all of his works that I've read, there is also a submerged longing for past love, past history, past glory.

Some of his most beautiful passages, both in this book, in "Prospero's Cell," and in the books of "The Alexandria Quartet" take place under water. Here, the author goes for a midnight swim in the final chapter of "Reflections on a Marine Venus"---

"The [moon]light filters down a full fathom or more to where, on the dark blackboard of weed, broken here and there by dazzling areas of milk-white sand, the fish float as if dazed by their own violet shadows which follow them back and forth, sprawling across the sea's floor."

Bright surfaces. Submerged longings. There is even a ghost story floating just below the surface of a trip to the Island of Patmos. This chapter has some of the most powerful and eerie descriptions in the book. It brings together the storms of the 'little summer of Saint Demetrius', a lost, lingering voice from the war, and an Abbot who presides over a monastery where St. John was said to have composed the Books of the Apocalypse.

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

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

The beauty of belonging to a reading group is that everyone is exposed to books that they might not normally read. I don't think that I would have considered reading this book except that it was the choice of my book club.

Well, this story was not really what I expected at all. Constance, Lady Chatterley is a rather likeable person who is trapped in a sad and boring life. What happens to her and her lover is something neither really anticipated nor expected. The book starts in 1917 and at the time when it was first published, the subject matter of LADY CHATTERLEY'S LOVER was considered to be totally shocking and unacceptable.

Yes, a few parts of the book have rather crude passages, and language, but Lady Chatterley herself is a very sympathetic character. The style of writing used by D. H. Lawrence is very descriptive and the pace of the story is probably a little slower than modern readers are used to. Aside from some offensive language, I think that this was a rather interesting, but very depressing book. Many of the characters seemed to be lacking in any kind of a moral code and I found most of the men in the story to be rather despicable.

This was the first book by Lawrence that I ever read, and it made me want to read his other works. Something in Lawrence's style, whether it's his complete and almost unsettling way of capturing human thought and emotion, or his flawless way with language, makes you long to be 'subjected' to his words for another 300 pages.

Since Lady C's Lover was the first of his books that I read, I had the idea, not surprisingly, that all of his works would contain that purity and honesty of word choice (aka profanity) that this famous work is ripe with. Don't think this for a minute. When you read Sons and Lovers, Women in Love, and The Rainbow, you will get the feeling that Lady C's Lover was Lawrence's great mental eruption. These other works *tremble* slightly with allusions; VERY subtle allusions. It's as though Lawrence's mind was building up and preparing itself with his other works for what would be Lady Chatterley's Lover. Because, if you haven't read anything by Lawrence and know little about him, you will receive a MASSIVE surprise with this book...either a very pleasant (my case) surprise, or an unpleasant one. If you took offence at Holden Caulfield's language, your mind will scream at the language of Lady C's Lover. What we call 'the F word' in our more self-conscious moments, is used surely more than 100 times in this work. I don't think I've ever seen more straight-out connotations, allusions, imagery, everything, than in this book. It's amazing! At times, you will catch yourself marvelling at how Lawrence must have written it in a white hot fever, unable to stop, but surely knowing just how hard it would be to get this puppy published in his day and age. The work, then, is a brutal piece of honesty written, I feel, for the author's sake more than for the public's. That makes it priceless. It's one of the rare moments when we can view a writer's 'literary soul,' the part of their mind that usually will not surface for fear of not being publishable.

Whether you'd describe it as beauty, art it would be a good idea to read Lady Chatterley's Lover so that you can know for yourself what you feel about what is probably one of the greatest books ever written.

Lawrence really lays bare his soul in this book. It is the story of a ripe, red blooded woman who needs a real man. As usual there doesn't seem enough to go around. Ladies! I hope you all meet a Mellor's in your lives. Gardening is indeed a great trade for aspiring lovers. And You'll love this tale - it was one of Lawrence's best.

Lawrence wanted to bring us back to our dynamic center; he hated this celebral world and head sex. His domain was the realm of the body ... And all of its pent up sexual dynamisms. If you read Fantasia of The Unconscious you will be able to access his views right from his teeming intelect. He was perhaps one of the finest writers Britain ever produced and his literary output was prodigious indeed!

I finish Durrell's first book of the Alexandrian Quartet- "Justine" and rush to my keyboard in search of the perfect words or phrases that would do this masterpiece justice. Nothing. Is this to signify writer's block? Or perhaps Durrell has already written of women what I would like to say of his book? Out of self-pride, and the highest of praises, I opt for the latter. Durrell has done himself the justice he deserves as one of the greatest writers of all times. Of an erotic story I once wrote, a friend/critic remarked that it is often better to tease than indulge. Being the brash young man that I was (still am to some degree) I had a hard time understanding that a slight tease can sometimes be more fulfilling than a deep indulgence. I picked up "Justine" with the understanding that a tease was all that would be offered. What I found upon completion was a desire for more rather than a smug satisfaction. That is the difference between a tease and an indulgence.

"Justine" begins with pages upon pages of beautiful poetic prose. Initially, I found it difficult to become immersed in the book, but as the story unraveled, I found myself more entwined. Upon further thought, I have concluded (and this is open to interpretation, as with anything) that Durrell was trying to paint a picture of a time and place that escapes everyday language. Rather than succumb to hum-drum limitations, he uses poetic prose as a painter would use layers of colors to achieve a desired effect. What the reader is left with is a sort of anxiety, as one would experience in an actual unknown world, where black and white only exist as stepping stones for more magnificent colors of experience. After all, experience is ultimately left to the individual; the successful writer offers an alternate path for such experiences. Only by reading this book can you truly understand what I am trying to say. My words about his book mean nothing without the book itself to provide the avenues for meaning.

The descriptions of place, in colors and lights, make me want to paint the beauty. The symbolism and literary devices are like plums to pick from a tree. Lush and rich.

Although the plot of the story stages around Justine and Darley's love, the ideas put forth are always bringing questions to my mind. For example, I have asked myself repeatedly, what qualities in a human cause them to be so loved by so many? It does not necessarily seem to be strength of character, loyalty, or beauty that entrances and seduces. What is it in Justine that is so enticing?

The book is stimulating and entertaining, but not on a level based on plot.

This ought to be required reading.

Justine is a gallery of desperate characters, lost in the labyrinth of the self. Incapable of helping themselves or each other, they wound one another or allow themselves to be wounded, instead. In the character of Justine is the intensification of the novel, its bruised and bloody heart. The lines between cruelty and weakness blur and dissolve in her person, and we quickly learn that everyone is a victim of their own temperament, and that no one is to blame.

Justine is a book full of awful music and terrible poetry, of helpless posession and excorcism,of bitter truths & life-sustaining illusions. A pained and painful meditation on Love and, ultimately, Life.

For all of Mr. Durrell's masterfully crafted and stirring descriptions of Alexandria, the city soon falls off (like so much dead skin) and, there emerges the Human Face - grimacing.

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.

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.

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.