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A review by thomasgoddard
Mountolive by Lawrence Durrell
3.0
A shift occurs and I find Mountolive to be the saddest of the first three novels. So much of it is reality in its darkest visage. A brutal and violent perspective.
Being my least favourite, perhaps for that very reason, I blitzed through to get to Clea more quickly.
It cannot be skipped. It is vital. We must all face reality.
'... the city with its obsessive rhythms of death and around them in the darkness -- the wail of tyres in empty squares, the scudding of liners, the piercing whaup of a tug in the inner harbour; he felt the dusty, deathward drift of the place as never before, settling year by year more firmly into the barren dunes of Mareotis. He turned his mind first this way and then that, like an hourglass; but it was always the same sand which shifted through it, the same questions which followed each other unanswerably at the same leaden pace.'
Being my least favourite, perhaps for that very reason, I blitzed through to get to Clea more quickly.
It cannot be skipped. It is vital. We must all face reality.
'... the city with its obsessive rhythms of death and around them in the darkness -- the wail of tyres in empty squares, the scudding of liners, the piercing whaup of a tug in the inner harbour; he felt the dusty, deathward drift of the place as never before, settling year by year more firmly into the barren dunes of Mareotis. He turned his mind first this way and then that, like an hourglass; but it was always the same sand which shifted through it, the same questions which followed each other unanswerably at the same leaden pace.'