Read for Second Monday book group. I was a huge Gerald Durrell fan as a kid, so I knew that his brother Larry was a writer, and as an adult I suppose the Alexandria Quartet has been on my (very long) TBR list for ages, so I was glad to be pushed to read this, which is the first of the series. But I didn’t much care for it and I will cross the other 3 off my list!
Short quotes
- “…the graceful curtain breathing softly in that breathless afternoon air like the sail of a ship. How often had we not lain in one another’s arms watching the slow intake and recoil of that transparent piece of bright linen?”
- “We turned to each other, closing like the two leaves of a door upon the past, shutting out everything”
- Balthazar says: “when all is said and done, [man is] just a passage for liquids and solids, a pipe of flesh”
- “Most people lie and let life play upon them like the tepid discharges of a douche-bag.”
- “a sweetness which a woman can always afford to spend upon the man she does not love”
- “Father Paul … seemed so profoundly happy a man, folded into his religion like a razor into its case”
- “the green figs … offer a shade so deep as to be like a wet cloth pressed to the skull”
- “in the moist gathering darkness the fireflies had begun to snatch fitfully”
- “Here at least, thought Nessim, building something with my own hands will keep me stable and unreflective — and he studied the horny old hands of the Greek with admiring envy as he thought of the time they had killed for him, of the thinking they had saved him. He read into them years of healthy bodily activity which imprisoned thought, neutralized reflection.”
- “a thin crust of thunder formed like a scab upon the melodious silence”
- “carrying her fatigue like a heavy pack”
- “the pressure of the headlights now peeled off layer after layer of the darkness”
Only long quote is from Nessim’s attack of dreams/illusions:
One afternoon a crumpled sheet began breathing and continued for a space of about half an hour, assuming the shape of the body it covered. One night he woke to the soughing of great wings and saw a bat-like creature with the head of a violin resting upon the bedrail.
Then the counter-agency of the powers of good — a message brought by a ladybird which settled on the notebook in which he was writing; the music of Weber’s Pan played every day between three and four on a piano in an adjoining house. He felt that his mind had become a battle-ground for the forces of good and evil and that his task was to strain every nerve to recognize them, but it was not easy. The phenomenal world had begun to play tricks on him so that his senses were beginning to accuse reality itself of inconsistency. He was in peril of a mental overthrow.
Once his waistcoat started ticking as it hung on the back of a chair, as if inhabited by a colony of foreign heartbeats. …
As he walked the length of the Rue Fuad he felt the entire pavement turn to sponge beneath his feet; he was foundering waist-deep in it before the illusion vanished.
In this book I learned
- banausic: mundane
- I couldn’t find the meaning of “conklin-coloured yams.” A Harold Conklin wrote an interesting paper about color categories in a Philippine culture – I was happy to stumble on it, but it was published in 1986 so no possible connection. But Jonathan did some research and this is plausible: Conklin Shows, founded in 1916, used a distinctive bright orange for their railcars and logo. This assumes that Durrell is actually describing sweet potatoes (not yams!), which is also very plausible.