Comments on: The Lost Booker http://bigother.com/2010/02/07/the-lost-booker/ Mon, 28 May 2012 12:01:34 +0000 hourly 1 http://wordpress.com/ By: John Madera http://bigother.com/2010/02/07/the-lost-booker/#comment-4828 Mon, 08 Feb 2010 01:33:30 +0000 http://bigother.com/?p=4429#comment-4828 Yes, it was Delany. On page 128, he lists Durrell, among many heavy hitters, in his “you need to read” list. (There are a few such lists in the book.) And he references The Alexandria Quartet (47) as a successful example of a “fictive work” that makes its “initial appeal through tone of voice–often a tone solidly bourgeois, educated, ironic.”

]]> By: John Madera http://bigother.com/2010/02/07/the-lost-booker/#comment-4824 Sun, 07 Feb 2010 21:48:50 +0000 http://bigother.com/?p=4429#comment-4824 A “very lush writer, overly free with his adjectives” sounds like the perfect type for me these days. I’ve been reading a lot of William Gass and Mary Caponegro, and have been going back to John Hawkes.

I think I may have first been encouraged to read Durrell from Samuel Delany’s mentioning of him somewhere, maybe in About Writing?

]]> By: Paul Kincaid http://bigother.com/2010/02/07/the-lost-booker/#comment-4810 Sun, 07 Feb 2010 19:25:47 +0000 http://bigother.com/?p=4429#comment-4810 The Alexandria Quartet is the one you absolutely must read. It is a fascinating work both structurally (each of the four novels makes you rethink what you took from the previous ones) and in terms of the writing (Durrell can be a very lush writer, overly free with his adjectives, but I find it most effective in the Quartet). After the Quartet I would recommend the travel books, Prospero’s Cell (on Corfu), Reflections on a Marine Venus (Rhodes) and Bitter Lemons (Cyprus), because they are gorgeous books, very evocative (I fell in love with Greece through the Durrell brothers, and if you haven’t already done so go away this moment and read My Family and Other Animals by Gerald Durrell because it is quite simply one of the finest, and also the funniest, books on Greece ever written). If you get that far, you will probably be a Durrell addict.

That’s the time to read the Quintet and The Revolt of Aphrodite, because they are works that require patience of the reader, so you need to be confident that the patience will be repaid. The Revolt of Aphrodite, by the way, is Durrell flirting with science fiction (it involves robots); it’s not brilliant but it is an interesting work.

]]> By: John Madera http://bigother.com/2010/02/07/the-lost-booker/#comment-4807 Sun, 07 Feb 2010 17:27:29 +0000 http://bigother.com/?p=4429#comment-4807 Hi Paul,

I’ve been wanting to read Durrell for some time, especially The Alexandria Quartet. How does The Revolt of Aphrodite compare?

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