Known is the friendship of Lawrence Durrell with Henry Miller, coinciding with the evolution of lives that ends up magnetizing the poles necessary for the most fascinating encounters. Although the truth is that Henry Miller seems to be a constant in more cases, as a strange and opportune character who gave birth to important avant-gardes of the XNUMXth century.
Be that as it may with Henry Miller, we return to Durrell to discover an erratic life, very typical for any writer necessarily influenced by changing realities to broaden his focus. From his native India to the England of his ancestors passing through Greece or Egypt among many other places from which he made that kind of transitory home of the restless spirit.
Forged as a writer from that changing world under his feet and loaded with the baggage of the literary avant-garde, Durrell had already earned his fertile creative space. Thanks to Miller, I knew that what was previously taboo could be made explicit (as an unequivocal tool to make literature true). Thus Durrell finally unleashed himself as a writer towards a line that is always exploratory in form and deep down towards a more exhaustive knowledge of the soul and its drives.
Top 3 Recommended Books by Lawrence Durrell
Justine
Within a quartet from Alexandria that does not seem to me to be the best of his works, this first installment is the one that supports the importance of the work to the greatest extent. The tetralogy may be long (depending on the reader), but this work, without the artifice and pretentiousness of a composition that points to the volume of a great writer with an air of eternity, is enjoyed as one of Durrell's usual trips Towards the discovery of the open grave, Justin is little less than the affective portrait of a city.
Through the gaze of a group of very diverse characters, some of them foreigners who know the city and its customs to varying degrees, Durrell shows us the ways of life and ways of relating to a city recreated with all its colors.
The affective, loving and sexual relationships between the protagonists is one of the aspects that caused the most impact at the time of their appearance, but praise was soon added to the wise combination of a collective but heterogeneous character with an unusual treatment of the space-time coordinates. Furthermore, the denouement, with a mysterious death, is actually an open ending that only acquires its full meaning after reading the rest of the quartet. Durrel transmits with strength and conviction the spell that a great city full of mystery and secrets had on him.
Anthrobus
Nothing as positive as knowing how to laugh at yourself. Only it is always better to transform the circumstances towards an alter ego who knows the same scenarios covered by the author. Then there is the extension of laughter, mockery, irony and criticism towards everything else seen in a world as constrained as that of diplomacy and its incessant protocols. Antrobus, the protagonist of these twenty stories, is an old-school Englishman, and an institution within the Foreign Office. Anchored in the past, this old-fashioned diplomat has been stationed, for the past thirty years, in Vulgaria [sic] and other enclaves located behind the Iron Curtain.
Although it cannot be said that all the misfortunes that occur are the fault of poor Antrobus, the truth is that he, like the entire diplomatic corps, is always in trouble. Heads of mission, military attachés, attached press and all the picturesque fauna that populate the embassies parade through the pages of this book complicating things even more. And if they finally succeed, there is no doubt that it is due to, as our protagonist says, their great "firmness in the face of adversity."
Mediterranean trilogy
This time the opposite happens to me than with the tetralogy of Alexandria. Because the novel that closes the pack, «Bitter Lemons» is that finishing touch to improve the whole. As if you had read something better than there was. Each of the novels collects with greater or lesser success that aspect of the Mediterranean as the cradle of all that is our civilization.
With the aroma of a Mare Nostrum that was not as big as once imagined by the ancient generators of legends and myths that have survived to this day, Durrell wanders like the traveler who travels all its coasts, who gets lost on islands where ancient echoes of finally lost mermaids resonate. . In the case of "Bitter Lemons," Durrell returns more to the terrain of the novel sprinkled with current portraits as future footnotes. It begins in Cyprus from 1953-1956, when the Greek Cypriots try to free themselves from British domination by resorting to the idea of Greek national unity, which leads them to confront the Turkish Cypriots.
Observations on the character of the island's inhabitants are intertwined with comments on current political and social affairs, descriptions of landscapes, historical evocations, emotional anecdotes and gastronomic recommendations that turn these three books into rare examples of a type of Durrell's very own book but absolutely unclassifiable, as original as any of his novels.
Lawrence Durrell makes an accurate portrait, very vivid and posed with his singular talent of three quite critical moments in the history of three Mediterranean islands, while drawing a magnificent socio-political panorama of key moments in the history of these islands, which he lived from the front line, and that in the case of Cyprus in particular, they still do not have a satisfactory solution for all.
However, the most interesting thing is the absolute and radical originality of these three books, which can be read for many different purposes and will not disappoint anyone. Coinciding with the author's centenary (which was widely celebrated throughout 2012 in English-speaking countries), Edhasa published for the first time in a single volume a book that the author himself conceived and considered as a unitary whole.
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