Non-Fiction Books
This work explores the Greek island of Rhodes, evoking the sunshine landscape and blue skies of the Aegean.
Bitter Lemons of Cyprus is Lawrence Durrell's unique account of his time in Cyprus, during the 1950s Enosis movement for freedom of the island from British colonial rule. Winner of the Duff Cooper Memorial Prize, it is a document at once personal, poetic and subtly political - a masterly combination of travelogue, memoir and treatise. 'He writes as an artist, as well as a poet; he remembers colour and landscape and the nuances of peasant conversation . . . Eschewing politics, it says more about them than all our leading articles . . . In describing a political tragedy it often has great poetic beauty.' Kingsley Martin, New Statesman 'Durrell possesses exceptional qualifications. He speaks Greek fluently; he has a wide knowledge of modern Greek history, politics and literature; he has lived in continental Greece and has spent many years in other Greek islands . . . His account of this calamity is revelatory, moving and restrained. It is written in the sensitive and muscular prose of which he is so consummate a master.' Harold Nicolson, Observer
Although Durrell spent much of his life beside the Mediterranean, he wrote relatively little about Italy; it was always somewhere that he was passing through on the way to somewhere else. Sicilian Carousel is his only piece of extended writing on the country and, naturally enough for the islomaniac Durrell, it focuses on one of Italy's islands. Sicilian Carousel came relatively late in Durrell's career, and is based around a slightly fictionalized bus tour of the island.
As every reader of Durrell knows, his writing is steeped in the living experience of the Mediterranean and especially the islands of Greece. This text weaves together evocative descriptions, history and myth (including flowers and festivals) with his personal reminiscences.
Lawrence Durrell (1912?1990), author of "The Alexandra Quartet," was a writer with a foot in two worlds. His childhood in India and life in France and Greece provided him with an ability to absorb many traditions, all of which are evident in his work. Proficient in several forms of the written word ? novels, poetry, travel writing, essays, drama ? Durrell's best-known work fused Western notions of time and space with Eastern metaphysics. Very little has been written about Durrell's work before the Second World War. With "A Smile in His Mind's Eye," Ray Morrison seeks to redress this neglect. While French symbolism and the writings of Remy de Gourmont and Arthur Schopenhauer were important to the development of Durrell's writing, it was his embrace of Taoism that truly illustrated a shift from a Western, patriarchal consciousness to that of an Eastern, feminine-centred one and marked Durrell's coming into his own as a writer. In the years before Durrell's death, Morrison became a close acquaintance of the writer, giving "A Smile in His Mind's Eye" a personal element unseen in most other scholarly analyses. The work is essential to understanding one of the twentieth century's most original and eclectic minds.