The Villa Ambron, where Lawrence Durrell lived and worked in Alexandria, is in a deplorable state according to this Facebook post by Ahmed Essam.
The terrible state of the historic villa has also been noticed by political activist Essam Fathallah, who has called for action to save the city of Alexandria and its heritage, as Egyptian outlet Al Youm 7 reports.
Durrell was not the only artist to live in the villa — Egyptian painters Effat Nagy and Saad al-Khadem also resided there.
New York artist L.C. Armstrong has named the British novelist Lawrence Durrell as an influence on her work, citing his quote, “We are all children of our own landscape.”
An exhibition of recent work by Armstrong, Central Park Paintings, will open at the Marlborough Gallery in New York on February 13 and continue through March 16, 2013.
I’d recommend heading over to Michael Haag’s blog here and reading his new post on Russian editions of the Alexandria Quartet, where he has shared has some lovely pictures of the covers as well as background on the Quartet in the former USSR.
Since we’re talking about the elder Durrell in Russia, Russian-speakers may be interested to read/watch this interesting round table chat on Durrell and the Alexandria Quartet from Radio Svoboda in 2011, at the time of the Egyptian Revolution.
I’ve translated a very small selection of interesting parts of the discussion below, which includes a comparison of Alexandria and Odessa!
I came across this rather nice review of ‘The Alexandria Quartet’ by the Pseudo Intellectual Reviews blog, who advocates this way of reading the novels:
The key to enjoying the work is simply to float with it – relax, don’t struggle and enjoy the prose poetry while waiting for Durrell’s coastguard to rescue you.
I found the review, with its call to enjoy the work and sort of immerse yourself in Durrell’s writing as if it were the Dead Sea, a refreshing antidote to the rash of trying-to-hard cynical “I can’t read Durrell because it’s too hard” pseudo-reviews that have erupted of late. This one, by the Spectator, is perhaps the worst. It asks a group of writers not to read something and comment on it, but to spew out a quick paragraph about the great works they “hate” plus a stunningly trite reason why. The result is an entire article that took zero thought and not much more time to create, a boon for the magazine’s editors no doubt, and one which appeals to readers by effectively saying ‘you will not have to think about anything you read for the next three minutes’.
In a depressing display of idiocy, Telegraph columnist Christopher Howse (who apparently “comments frequently and blogs on the uses and abuses of the English language”) says the following about Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment, which he has not actually read. (To do the research for this article, however, Howse went so far as to glance at the first page of a free edition on the internet, before his attention span ran out and he looked at some Lolcats instead):
I don’t know any Russian, and translations soon bring me up short. ‘I’ve learned to chatter this last month, lying for days together in my den thinking… of Jack the Giant-killer,’ says Raskolnikov on the first page. Did Dostoevsky mention Jack the Giant-killer, or was it some other tale, familiar in Russia? Would Dostoevsky really have expressed things in the language used? I stop reading and turn to something else.
Thanks for sharing your thoughts with us, Christopher. I know, reading is hard isn’t it? And Dostoevsky was a bit wordy, wasn’t he? And wasn’t he thoughtless to write in Russian instead of making the effort to write in English, which everyone who matters speaks. Of course, there’s only one translation of Crime and Punishment, too – the really ancient Constance Garnett one you referenced.
While Christopher seems to think that only English literature in English matters, and English speakers should not bother to learn other languages (too hard) or read foreign books in translation (pointless) I’ll just add that in the Russian original, Raskolnikov talks about Tsar Gorokh which is rather hard to translate into idiomatic English and actually it’s considered by some critics (like John Spiegel) an important reference to the lengthy psychogenesis of Raskolnikov’s decision to murder his landlady, since Tsar Gorokh is a synonym for the distant past. Whatever!
I wonder what Christopher turned to after giving up Dostoevsky after half a page? I would recommend “The Very Hungry Caterpillar” – not only is it written in English, it’s mercifully short and has lots of pictures to help you understand the story. Hurrah!
To return to Durrell, The Spectator has poet Jeremy Clarke dismissing The Alexandria Quartet as not worth it after he read the first sentence, which I suspect is all he bothered to read. You might as well learn a language instead, Clarke suggests – something that Howse would surely disagree with, if his attention didn’t wander before he had time to formulate that thought.
I wonder what language Clarke learned, perhaps it was Russian in which case he could help Howse understand Crime and Punishment, or maybe he wouldn’t be able to get past the first sentence.
Clarke goes on to say that readers can find out for themselves by going into a charity shop where, he says, they will find a copy of Justine (I think he was trying to be witty).
In response to the Spectator churnalism piece, Allan Massie wrote a blog in The Telegraph, in which he finally made the point that if you don’t like a classic book maybe it’s because you’re “not a good enough reader”, and that if we don’t like a classic book “the fault might lie within ourselves”, whatever that means.
I have no problem with anyone not liking a book, classic or not – I just think fluff like the Spectator piece is incredibly boring because by trying to sound clever and knowing in a single easy-to-read paragraph, none of the contributors gave any insight into their own personal literary tastes or experiences, plus I find these public displays of lauding laziness quite depressing.
Personally, for example, I dislike quite a lot of Dickens mostly because he represents the sort of nauseating Victorian English sentimental kitsch that I find annoying (‘A Christmas Carol’, anyone?) but specifically I hold a grudge against him because of his anti-Semitic portrait of Fagin in Oliver Twist and because of his armpit-torchingly embarrassing rendition of Stephen Blackpool’s Northern accent in Hard Times (and the fact that of course, Stephen, who knows his place, has perfectly pure morals).
BBC Radio 4 is set to broadcast a programme on Thursday (Jan 3) about Lawrence Durrell. It should be available online at the link above.
This year Lawrence Durrell is or would have been 100. Tim Marlow sleeps beneath a special shelf above his bed which holds his collection of first editions of Durrell. He is a devotee. What does Durrell and those bright covered novels of The Alexandria Quartet once read by every open-minded reader mean today? Can his reputation extend beyond his surviving fans and the occasional leftovers of scandal? Should new readers pick him up, what would they find? With archive recordings and new interviews a reassessment of a revolutionary writer in danger of being forgotten. Producer: Tim Dee
Durrell with Egyptian journalist and writer Fathi Elabiary in Alexandria
As part of this series of posts about Durrell in the Arabic-speaking world, here is a piece from Saudi daily newspaper al-Riyadh from last year on the Alexandria Quartet. It’s by Dr. Abdullah Ibrahim, who writes about literature for the paper (here is a piece he wrote about Nabokov’s Lolita.)
Ibrahim talks about how he was discussing Alexandria and its intellectual history, and was first reminded of the 2009 movie Agora, which is set in Alexandria in the late 4th century and which explores the life of Hypatia, and which includes dramatic scenes in the Alexandria library. Ibrahim then recalled the Alexandria Quartet, which he said Durrell created as a sort of fantasy through which he could explore his various characters’ destinies against the backdrop of the ancient city.
However, the Quartet gave rise to much criticism regarding Durrell’s portrayal of Alexandria, a controversy that stemmed from the question of whether the narrative should have portrayed the city’s history, society and development. Durrell’s critics did not see in the Quartet an image of the Alexandria they knew:
[they did not find] an Alexandria that matched their personal account of experiences, information and facts, and so accused the author of deception and forgery, clad in harlotry and alien to Egypt
The critics “did not take into account that Durrell had created an image narrative of Alexandria” and had created a Utopia compatible with his perspective and personal experiences. Durrell “slipped into the world of the city” almost two decades after leaving it, combining in his narrative a nostalgic colonial feel with lively fantasy elements. The Quartet’s characters “intertwined in mysterious relationships, wander the city’s alleyways and move through its streets, and all the while free of the city’s topography”. Durrell “borrowed the spirit of the place”, taking his memories of the city and using his imagination to create a world.
Ibrahim wrote a more detailed article about the Quartet previously for al-Riyadh, in 2007.
Notes:
Al-Riyadh is technically an independent newspaper, but it is pro-government.
Arabic copy of Justine from the library in Alexandria
I get a fair few visitors from the Arab world to this site, from Egypt as one might expect given the setting of the Alexandria Quartet but also from other countries including the United Arab Emirates and Qatar.
Anyway, I wanted to offer non-Arabic speakers a glimpse at recent comment and writing from the Arab world about Lawrence Durrell and the Alexandria Quartet, particularly around the Durrell Centenary celebrations.
This is hardly a comprehensive study, just a quick snapshot over a few posts. This post will focus on Egyptian views of Durrell.
Open Road Integrated Media have published an excerpt from Lawrence Durrell’s Judith as their extract of the week.
As we couldn’t agree more with The New York Times in that “Durrell remains an irreplaceable master of English and European literature,” we’re delighted to share an excerpt from Judith, a breathtaking, never-before-published novel of passion and politics, set in the hotbed of Palestine in the 1940s.
As ORIM explains, the book was originally conceived as a screenplay for a 1966 film starring Sophia Loren. I wrote a previous post about it here, which includes a screen shot of a newspaper article from the time the movie was shot.
Historian and writer Michael Haag has a very interesting blog post about Lawrence Durrell’s supposed Irish ancestry. I’d recommend popping over and having a read and also a look at the photos, and while you’re there do peruse his archives for more Durrell-related stuff!
But the truth about Durrell is that he had good English roots on both sides of his family.
Haag is writing a biography about Durrell, which given his past work both on Durrell and on Alexandria looks set to be rather fascinating.
A recent travel piece about Corfu from the Irish Times, featuring a review of the White House at Kalami, now a Durrell-themed tourist attraction, including a very special menu…
LAWRENCE DURRELL’S WHITE HOUSE sits at one end of Kalami Bay, its turquoise waters twinkling gently in the midday sun. It looks rather as he described it in Prospero’s Cell, his account of life on Corfu, that “brilliant little speck of an island in the Ionian Sea”, where he lived with his family from 1936 to 1939.
The red-tiled, three-storey, square house is indeed “set like a dice on a rock already venerable with the scars of wind and water”. Durrell fled England, whose culture and weather he loathed – “English death” he called it rather harshly – for his “unregretted” Greek island home.
A former fisherman’s house, it’s a rather simple building, yet utterly beautiful – sturdy and tranquil at one and the same time. You gaze upon it at the far end of the crescent-shaped beach and think: “My God, what would it be like to live there and write every day in the morning?”
It must be a little gold mine for the Atheneos family, Tassos and Daria, whose ground floor taverna spills onto the venerable rock on which the house stands, as well as on to the boardwalk jetty. From May to September, they are rarely short of customers. The upper floors of the White House, which Durrell helped the Atheneos family to build, contain rooms to let.
One imagines Lawrence would have been terribly amused.
Durrelliana 