Scan barcode
A review by sarahreadsaverylot
The Black Book by Lawrence Durrell
3.0
3.5~4 stars.
Something of what you would expect from a young tormented Durrell. The prose is almost embarrassingly purple. Sometimes a violent violet, other times a subdued mauve. It is existential Freudian coming of age prose. It is brooding, angst-ridden prose. Prose that comes from loving Lawrence and Miller. And Baudelaire.
"These abstractions crossing and recrossing the drunken mind; and we on a planet, buzzing in space across the alphabetical stars: the creak of the earth curling away into the night like a quoit, like the creak of cable and spar on a ship; and only this mushy carpet on which to dread out our footsteps towards the final wedding with loneliness.
Does the endless iteration of loneliness tire you? It is the one constant in our lives. Even when the night now is spotted with shadows whose dapple seems to present a graph of this emotion. Oh, behind it, I know--somehow behind it in a dimension which I cannot fathom, life still tumbles across the scenes smelling of pageantry, heroic, wet white, blue goitres, clowns, sopranos, fire-eaters. . .But we shall never reach it."
Ho hum.
Something of what you would expect from a young tormented Durrell. The prose is almost embarrassingly purple. Sometimes a violent violet, other times a subdued mauve. It is existential Freudian coming of age prose. It is brooding, angst-ridden prose. Prose that comes from loving Lawrence and Miller. And Baudelaire.
"These abstractions crossing and recrossing the drunken mind; and we on a planet, buzzing in space across the alphabetical stars: the creak of the earth curling away into the night like a quoit, like the creak of cable and spar on a ship; and only this mushy carpet on which to dread out our footsteps towards the final wedding with loneliness.
Does the endless iteration of loneliness tire you? It is the one constant in our lives. Even when the night now is spotted with shadows whose dapple seems to present a graph of this emotion. Oh, behind it, I know--somehow behind it in a dimension which I cannot fathom, life still tumbles across the scenes smelling of pageantry, heroic, wet white, blue goitres, clowns, sopranos, fire-eaters. . .But we shall never reach it."
Ho hum.