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Reading: Bitter Lemons
Nov. 18th, 2016 07:05 pmReading Race of Scorpions, which is set largely in Cyprus, reminded me that I had a copy of Lawrence Durrell's book about the time he spent living in Cyprus between 1953 and 1956 (handily shelved next to the Dorothy Dunnett). I bought it years ago, probably about the time I read Gerald Durrell's My Family and Other Animals, but didn't really get on with the writing. Still, I hung on to it, and I thought I'd give it another go.
There are some beautiful descriptive passages which made me long to see Cyprus for myself, but I didn't much like Durrell as he characterises himself in his own book; too much British Imperial superiority and humorous anecdotes about the comical Cypriot peasants he encounters in his quest to buy and refurbish a house and in his work as a teacher at the Gymnasium in Nicosia, along with a fair amount of name-dropping about the visits he receives from the literati (Rose Macauley, Freya Stark, Patrick Leigh Fermor, to name but a few of many). The latter part of his stay in Cyprus coincided with the rise in violence as the Cypriot struggle for independence from Britain and union with Greece, and the second half of the book, which I thought was both darker and better than the first half, describes the gradual descent from normality into chaos. I found it somewhat unsettling reading at this particular point in history, I have to say.
There are some beautiful descriptive passages which made me long to see Cyprus for myself, but I didn't much like Durrell as he characterises himself in his own book; too much British Imperial superiority and humorous anecdotes about the comical Cypriot peasants he encounters in his quest to buy and refurbish a house and in his work as a teacher at the Gymnasium in Nicosia, along with a fair amount of name-dropping about the visits he receives from the literati (Rose Macauley, Freya Stark, Patrick Leigh Fermor, to name but a few of many). The latter part of his stay in Cyprus coincided with the rise in violence as the Cypriot struggle for independence from Britain and union with Greece, and the second half of the book, which I thought was both darker and better than the first half, describes the gradual descent from normality into chaos. I found it somewhat unsettling reading at this particular point in history, I have to say.
