BOOKS: Alexandria Quartet

During the first half of the twentieth century Alexandria, Egypt was a glitteringly sophisticated and breathtaking place, the home to an exotic variety of people that drew their energy and life from the Mediterranean, but it also was a place that at times was suffocatingly evil. The city seemed to have a life of its own, seemed to be alive, seemed to have its own personality. In a dazzling series of novels, "The Alexandria Quartet," Lawrence Durrell brings the the reader into Alexandria in a tone poem of beautiful language, and intensity of description. Here the city is central and shapes the lives of the characters. Durrell describes it as, "a thousand dust-tormented streets. Flies and beggars own it today and those who enjoy an intermediate existence between either. Five races, five languages, a dozen creeds...Long sequences of tempera. Light filtered through the essence of lemons. An air full of brick-dust__sweet smelling brick dust and the odour of hot pavements slaked with water." Durrell is a marvelous wordsmith and looks intensely at life. This novel is an immersion in sensuous and enticing words . The Alexandria Durrell describes doesn't exist anymore, a World War and political changes have molded into something different forever, but Durrell here captures a brief moment in time when Alexandria was intoxicately beautiful.