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A review by rupertowen
The Black Book by Lawrence Durrell
5.0
I found Lawrence's prose to be utterly immersing, initially I only got so far into it and then had to start again as so dense is [b:the painted word|2671|The Painted Word|Tom Wolfe|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1161129102s/2671.jpg|6617] used by Lawrence that I found myself losing track, or smudged in. However the second attempt from scratch was continuous and I gave up noting words down to look up in the dictionary as Lawrence tends to fill entire sentences with wonderful words for the job that although not knowing half the meanings, I got the picture.
The story is wonderfully crass, filled with anti-erotica, kind of like if Tom Sharpe was to have written À rebours. The characters, especially Tarquin are sublime, although Gregory Death came and went losing me a bit, I never quite knew where Gregory Death stood in relation to Lawrence Lucifer - the rest were fine such as Lobo, Gracie, Clare, and Perez, but because Gregory and Lawrence were the only characters to speak in the first person I stumbled along their relationship to each other.
It is said that Lawrence felt this book to be the first time he "found his voice" and at 24 you can only imagine what that must have felt like, but Lawrence himself felt the book to be somewhat "green", I can understand that, some of the symbolic metaphors and references to obvious external influences in literature and culture were clearly the same as any artist has when cutting his teeth in the world of expression and self.
All in all, I will read this book again, no doubts about it. I have Lawrence's novel "Bitter Lemons" to look forward to but I don't think I'll read "The Alexandria Quartet", I certainly have an interest in reading Lawrence's brother's book "My family and other animals" which is the same account of one of Lawrence's novels, I forget the name of right now.
The story is wonderfully crass, filled with anti-erotica, kind of like if Tom Sharpe was to have written À rebours. The characters, especially Tarquin are sublime, although Gregory Death came and went losing me a bit, I never quite knew where Gregory Death stood in relation to Lawrence Lucifer - the rest were fine such as Lobo, Gracie, Clare, and Perez, but because Gregory and Lawrence were the only characters to speak in the first person I stumbled along their relationship to each other.
It is said that Lawrence felt this book to be the first time he "found his voice" and at 24 you can only imagine what that must have felt like, but Lawrence himself felt the book to be somewhat "green", I can understand that, some of the symbolic metaphors and references to obvious external influences in literature and culture were clearly the same as any artist has when cutting his teeth in the world of expression and self.
All in all, I will read this book again, no doubts about it. I have Lawrence's novel "Bitter Lemons" to look forward to but I don't think I'll read "The Alexandria Quartet", I certainly have an interest in reading Lawrence's brother's book "My family and other animals" which is the same account of one of Lawrence's novels, I forget the name of right now.