However, there is a sense in which he is indestructible, only because he has reached the point where he is now indivisible. He cannot be further fragmented, he cannot be divided into even tinier parts. There is no smaller manifestation that is still identifiable as a functioning human being capable of giving and receiving love. Durrell was born in Jalandhar, British India, the eldest son of Indian-born British colonials Louisa (who was Anglo-Irish) and Lawrence Samuel Durrell, an engineer of English ancestry. [3] His first school was St. Joseph's School, North Point, Darjeeling. He had three younger siblings — two brothers and a sister — naturalist Gerald Durrell, Leslie Durrell and author Margaret Durrell. Gifford, James (30 July 2004). "Lawrence Durrell: Text, Hypertext, Intertext". Agora: An Online Graduate Journal . Retrieved 14 October 2007. Zahlan, Anne. R. "War at the Heart of the Quincunx: Resistance and Collaboration in Durrell's Constance." Deus Loci: The Lawrence Durrell Journal NS12 (2010). 38–59. I might finish it at another time, but I’d like to do it at a point where I might be able to appreciate the intent behind the metaphors and ignore the frustrating digressions. I did like the first part of this so much. But now is not that time.

I struggled with this book. I hated it until the very end of Part Three, of which there are a total of four. My opinion changed dramatically at that point. It went from a one star to a four star book. I know what changed and I know what didn’t change. I will try and explain so you can decide whether this is a book for you, but this is just my personal reaction to the book. Each one of us approaches a book with different baggage. it treats also of recollected experiences of love, with Proust's "Remembrance of Things Past." Mr. Durrell has become a truly important writer, and one whose development, as revealed in this volume (the first of a trilogy) Morrison, Ray. A Smile in His Mind's Eye: A Study of the Early Works of Lawrence Durrell. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 2005. The King of Asine and Other Poems (1948), by George Seferis and translated by Durrell, Bernard Spencer, and Nanos Valaoritis This is a peculiar type of love for I do not feel that I possess her - nor indeed would wish to do so. It is as if we joined each other only in self-possession, became partners in a common stage of growth. In fact we outrage love, for we have proved the bonds of friendship stronger."

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Ah Clea! The numinous, unknowable Clea, the painter of victims of venereal disease - a minor one of which I was recovering from myself. "I do not deny myself love," she said. "I am living in the beauty of an achieved relationship with a woman." My landlord told me the French consul longed to replace me as Justine's lover and tormented me with the story of her first marriage to Arnaute, a French Albanian. How she longed to be beaten for the remission of her adulterous sins. "Engorge-moi in a syllogistic love," she would implore him. Can real people only exist in the imagination of great artists? Non.

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If that sounds over-blown, well, the Quartet itself is not without pretension, in concept as in performance. As has generally been admitted, it is often ornate and over-written, sometimes to an almost comical degree. The high ambition of its schema can make its narratives and characters inexplicably confusing, and its virtuoso use of vocabulary can be trying ("pudicity"? "noetic"? "fatidic"? "scry"?). But if there are parts of the work that few readers, I suspect, will navigate without skipping, there are many passages of such grand inspiration that reaching them feels like emerging from choppy seas into marvellously clear blue Mediterranean waters. The story circulates around four people during the period leading up to World War II. The story is set in Alexandria, Egypt. The city is a major part of the story with the narrator claiming that the city and its ways have a hold on the inhabitants and forever mark them. The four people are the narrator - who is never called by name - his girlfriend Melissa, the woman with whom he has an affair Justine, and Justine's husband Nessim. As the story opens, the narrator tells of his life at the end of the story in which he lives quietly, raising Melissa's child and doing little else. He then changes the setting to his life in Alexandria.