Heliotaxis

Finally a heavyweight Sun steps into the weekend ring and his muscular sunray fingers form a fireball fist to sucker punch Boston squarely in the city center with. His golden arm has been winding up to deliver this sizzling blow since early April, and so now the weather is suddenly swelteringly hot with a vengeance. These are the sorts of boiling temperatures in which fly-swatting Sicilian peasants curse snoring donkeys while beating the yellow dust from straw carpets. Meanwhile, I, in the stooping manner of Atlas shouldering the world, emerge from the basement with an air-conditioning system as a burden for my back. The retrieval and installation of this extremely cumbersome mechanical device is a solemn annual ritual, the lumbering procession of human and appliance advancing from storage bin to window rather like an icon of Saint Coolant being paraded to the altar on his special Feast Day.
For some reason, the first hot days of the year always reminds me of my curious inability to finish any of the Lawrence Durrell novels I begin to read. This failure is due, I have no doubt, to my avid enjoyment of his younger brother Gerald’s autobiographical books when I was small. The elder Durrell was lampooned so relentlessly in these that I have been unable to take him seriously ever since.

Comments

[Fcb]

I'm guessing that it was the younger Gerald - known better to britons in his later life of naturalist and zoo owner and wonderful TV shows about the animal kingdom - who wrote the memoirs of life as a boy on Corfu (or some other Mediterranean island) rather than his serious-literature elder brother?

I often get the two confused, to the extent that Lawrence is my free-association response to "Durrell" even though I mean Gerald and have never really read his brother? I think I tried once, but was just too young.

Almost points to a trend for 20th century second sons: where once they fell into the priesthood of the Church of England, now they become naturalists and far more interesting? The Durrells. The Attenboroughs?

[Bleak Mouse]

I think that there is a perfect time in life for reading Lawrence Durrell, although it may have to be refined from a too-broad period of years to a fleeting one of weeks. I very much admired The Alexandria Quartet around the age of twenty. These novels were thrust upon me by a highly enthused young lady in whom I was interested. She later became a Wiccan. I do not know if the two interests are connected. I never had the remotest inclination towards Wiccanism, yet of the two of us I was by far the madder.

I attempted to re-read the Quartet a decade later, but much to my surprise found it entirely unreadable.

There is a moral here, somewhere.

I didn't know that Gerry and Larry were related. I naturally assumed not, as that would be, ha ha, preposterous.

[stephenesque]

Brothers they be. "My Family & Other Animals" contains an entertaining satrical portrait of Lawrence Durrell.

[Anna]

Coincidence, I just re-read the Alexandria Quartet on holiday, quite voraciously. Found a copy in a junk shop and fancied it a couple of decades after my first read.
He's a great stylist, the prose slips down like blancmange.

Last hols I took Paul Scott's Raj Quartet and got so wild with it I threw it in a rockpool. Same events retold from multi-perspectives. Miraculous that such a dense thing could be turned into a magical TV drama - did you see it?

[Bleak Mouse]

I don't know about Stephen, but I do remember the BBC production of Scott's Raj novels. That was many moons ago, was it not? But I recall the Scott novels only vaguely, as being rather bland -- from a period when I read everything about the wax and wane of the Empire I could find.

I might try to re-reread Durrell again as an experiment. Certainly, the first time was bliss. Perhaps it has to do with the fact that I enjoyed Alexandria the first time with generous alcoholic refreshment, the second time not. An aesthetic dictum of mine is that things should be reread once per decade, a rule I follow about three percent of the time, but this does not prevent my strongly recommending it to the gullible. Anyway, it's about time to give my long-unchanged Ranking of Novels a thorough shake-up. Although this could just as easily move Durrell down a few notches as up.

[stephenesque]

I keep meaning to get around to Paul Scott, but never quite manage it somehow. It is supposed to be good, I think, but always looks suspicious to me. That might be the horrible paperback covers tho'.

[Bleak Mouse]

Awful paperback covers are a trial. I for one would like to see the return of the great age of the Lurid Paperback Cover -- when everything had a picture of a semi-clad trollop in an alluring pose, with a tough guy smoking a cigarette off to the side. Worked well for Ian Fleming and Mickey Spillane, but even better for Bronte and Hardy.

Whenever I see British Empire novels these days, I'm afraid I'm in for moralistic hectoring about bad ol' imperialism. so I skip them.

[DarkoV]

Funny, this Durrell thing. I'd started by reading the Quartet. When I picked up a few of Gerald's books, I couldn't make it through a one of them. Having come back from Corfu, I thought at least Gerald's book about that island would be interesting. Never managed to finish that book either.
Wonder if starting with one of the brothers Durrell poisons the mind for the other?