Reading: Bitter Lemons

[white_hart]

Reading 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.

Comments

[antisoppist]

I have Amateurs in Eden, the story of a Bohemian Marriage: Nancy and Lawrence Durrell and he doesn't come off very well in that, but the subtitle "written by her daughter" (Joanna Hodgkin) does indicate it's going to take Nancy's side. That's 30s & 40s though.

The only Lawrence Durrell I've read is White Eagles over Serbia which a misguided English teacher made us read when I was twelve (in a class in which several pupils were extremely poor readers in the first place). It did not go well. I sat at the back reading PG Wodehouse while people threw things at each other mostly.

[white_hart]

I do rather feel (possibly unfairly) that someone who was married four times may not actually have been very good at being a husband. (Though I was quite suprised to find he was married at all, because I had always assumed he was gay.)