Have to give me a little time Byb. Finding the book on the table, a friend of my wife's has borrowed it! At least she showed good taste.
Meanwhile, here's another helping of Lawrence Durrell:
“Swerving down those long dusty roads among the olive groves, down the shivering galleries of green leaf I came, diving from penumbra to penumbra of shadow, feeling that icy contrast of sunblaze and darkness under the ruffling planes, plunging like a river trout in rapids from one pool of shadows to the next, the shadows almost icy in comparison with the outer sunshine and hard metalled blue sky. So to come at last upon Valence where the shift of accent begins: the cuisine veers from cream to olive oil and spices in the more austere dietary of the south, with the first olives and mulberries and the tragic splash of flowering Judas, the brilliant violet brushstroke of unique Judas. Here, like the signature at the end of a score, the steady orchestral drizzle of cicadas: such strange sybilline music and such an exceptional biography, so scant of living time, with so long underground in the dark earth before rising into the light! Anisette everywhere declared itself as the ideal accompaniment for the evening meditations of the players of boules; no village square in summer was without the clickety-click of the little steel balls, no shady village without its boulistes ……”
Lawrence Durrell
“Caesar’s Vast Ghost – Aspects of Provence”
1990
I am fond of this description because on first reading it there was an instant feeling of recognition and nostalgic longing – back came the memory of the light and shade, the burnt umber colours, the tiny villages, the cicadas, the smells…. Even the comparison with the gliding trout brought back an image from a French film; probably it was “Un homme et une femme”. In the film the man makes a car journey by night, I think, unfortunately, the reverse way round, to Paris from the midi. Much of it is shot from above through trees etc and there is exactly that sense of sliding in and out of sight, moving purposefully onward. (Both man and trout driven by the same instinct, now I think of it).
A personal view, as I have no literary qualifications (maybe pretensions!). It strikes me that Durrell does not usually choose to use the spareness of writing, using the exact minimum of words needed to convey images and emotions, of some of the other writers that grace this thread. In his writing, though not so noticeable in the sample above, he frequently spends words prodigiously, seemingly for the love of them, the feel and taste of them in the mind and the mouth. Byb's example earlier in the thread shows some of this. Is this the influence of Provence upon his writing? I love it.
dxb
