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5.0 out of 5 stars
One of my favorite books. Gorgeous use of language., Jan 26 2004
This is a magnificent book. The legend around it is that Durrell sent the manuscript for this to Henry Miller, in Paris, and asked that he read it and then toss it in the Seine... Miller read it, and obviously did not cast it away, instead helped to have it published... TS Eliot was one of the guys responsible for getting this out. So goes the name dropping...Now, I'm not a fan of Miller's works. Sue me, the guy just doesn't appeal to my sensibilities... And most of Lawrence Durrell's later novels don't do much for me either- I'm not sure what it is, I feel like the power of The Black Book, all its vigor and spleen, all that lyrical spite became diminished, somehow. I love the language of this book. The fisrt couple pages- I can read them over and over. I've read them to my little brother, my mother, several girlfriends... All values are personal in their manifestation- as I said, I have read parts of this (my favorite parts) to people before and they were not as moved as I was. So I'm not claiming this to be the key text that will unlock 20th C. literature for you (look to Celine for that!). It's just highly reccommended to you as an angry denunciation of a world long gone. The author is trapped in his values, his place, his class and he wants to burn it all away, tear it all down- all the emptiness, the lack of connection, the bald hypocrisy and the babbling of the masses. The lies and the desolate souls around him that murmur... But he can't help loving the world he loathes, the beauty and transience of it... and can't help but loathe himself for loving it... I'm rambling... And I haven't said a thing about plot or characters... So be it. If you are a fan of Isaac Babel, Platonov, John Kennedy Toole, Charles Portis, TS Eliot, Sartre, Henry Miller, Wallace Stevens, John Fowles, Calvino, Tibor Fischer, Unamuno, Burroughs... There's some slice of similarity in all those writers...
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