Bitter Lemons of Cyprus

Bitter Lemons of Cyprus

by Lawrence Durrell (Author)

Synopsis

Bitter Lemons of Cyprus is Lawrence Durrell's unique account of his time in Cyprus, during the 1950s Enosis movement for freedom of the island from British colonial rule. Winner of the Duff Cooper Memorial Prize, it is a document at once personal, poetic and subtly political - a masterly combination of travelogue, memoir and treatise. "He writes as an artist, as well as a poet; he remembers colour and landscape and the nuances of peasant conversation...Eschewing politics, it says more about them than all our leading articles...In describing a political tragedy it often has great poetic beauty." (Kingsley Martin, New Statesman). "Durrell possesses exceptional qualifications. He speaks Greek fluently; he has a wide knowledge of modern Greek history, politics and literature; he has lived in continental Greece and has spent many years in other Greek islands...His account of this calamity is revelatory, moving and restrained. It is written in the sensitive and muscular prose of which he is so consummate a master." (Harold Nicolson, Observer).

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More Information

Format: Mass Market Paperback
Pages: 288
Edition: Main
Publisher: Faber & Faber
Published: 03 Jul 2000

ISBN 10: 0571201555
ISBN 13: 9780571201556
Book Overview: Lawrence Durrell's Bitter Lemons of Cyprus is a beautiful, funny and moving account of his time in Cyprus during its struggle against colonialism.

Author Bio
Lawrence Durrell was born in 1912 in India. He attended the Jesuit College at Darjeeling and St Edmund's School, Canterbury. His first literary work, The Black Book, appeared in Paris in 1938. His first collection of poems, A Private Country, was published in 1943, followed by the three Island books: Prospero's Cell, Reflections on a Marine Venus, about Rhodes, and Bitter Lemons of Cyprus, his account of life in Cyprus. Durrell's wartime sojourn in Egypt led to his masterpiece, The Alexandria Quartet, which he completed in southern France where he settled permanently in 1957. Between the Quartet and The Avignon Quintet he wrote the two-decker Tunc and Nunquam. His oeuvre includes plays, a book of criticism, translations, travel writing, and humorous stories about the diplomatic corps. Caesar's Vast Ghost, his reflections on the history and culture of Provence, including a late flowering of poems, appeared a few days before his death in Sommieres in 1990.