Αλεξάνδρεια: Η πόλη της μνήμης

by Michael Haag, Δημήτρης Στεφανάκης (Translator)

Στα σύνορα της Ιστορίας και του Μύθου, καθημερινή αλλά και κομβικό σημείο της φαντασίας, η Αλεξάνδρεια υπήρξε κάποτε η ενσάρκωση του κοσμοπολίτικου πνεύματος. Οι Έλληνες, οι Ιταλοί και οι Εβραίοι της έδωσαν το μοναδικό της χρώμα, κι οι συγγραφείς της βρήκαν τον τόνο για να αποδώσουν το συναισθηματικό και ερωτικό φορτίο της ύπαρξής της. Εκεί στηρίζεται και το εγχείρημα του Χάαγκ, που ξεναγεί τον αναγνώστη στους λαβυρίνθους της των χρόνων του Μεσοπολέμου μέσα από τους παράλληλους βίους των τριών συγγραφέων που έδεσαν τη ζωή και το έργο τους με το όνομα της Αλεξάνδρειας τον Ε.Μ. Φόρεστερ, τον Καβάφη και τον Ντάρρελ.

"Ο Καβάφης πέθανε πριν από το τέλος, το οποίο είχε ήδη προεξοφλήσει η απαισιόδοξη νότα της ποίησής του", λέει ο Μάικλ Χάαγκ. "Ο Φόρστερ σκέφτηκε πως το μέλλον της 'σαν όλες τις άλλες μεγάλες εμπορικές πόλεις είναι αμφίβολο'. Μέχρι την εποχή που ο Ντάρρελ ολοκλήρωσε το Αλεξανδρινό κουαρτέτο, δεν υπήρχε πια... Υπάρχουν όμως ακόμη επιστολές και ημερολόγια και η προφορική μαρτυρία όσων ζουν ακόμα, υπάρχουν και οι δρόμοι, τα τραμ και η καταρρέουσα αρχιτεκτονική της ίδιας της πόλης, και όλα αυτά θυμίζουν τα περασμένα".

Η έκδοση συμπληρώνεται με 26σέλιδο φωτογραφικό παράρτημα με εικόνες από ιδιωτικές συλλογές, καθώς και από το προσωπικό αρχείο του συγγραφέα-φωτογράφου.

«Η "Αλεξάνδρεια" του Μάικλ Χάαγκ είναι ένα σημαντικό επίτευγμα. Δεν αποτελεί απλώς μια σύνθετη βιογραφία των Φόρστερ, Καβάφη και Ντάρρελ σε σχέση με την πόλη, αλλά είναι η ιστορία της Αλεξάνδρειας, καρυκευμένη με συναρπαστικές λεπτομέρειες.»
(Καθηγητής Sir Frank Kermode)

Περιεχόμενα:
ΠΡΟΛΟΓΟΣ Η ΠΡΩΤΕΥΟΥΣΑ ΤΗΣ ΜΝΗΜΗΣ
ΚΕΦΑΛΑΙΟ 1 ΤΡΑΜ ΜΕ ΘΕΑ
ΚΕΦΑΛΑΙΟ 2 Η ΑΛΕΞΑΝΔΡΕΙΑ ΕΚ ΤΩΝ ΕΣΩ
ΚΕΦΑΛΑΙΟ 3 ΑΝ Η ΑΓΑΠΗ ΕΙΝΑΙ ΑΙΩΝΙΑ
ΚΕΦΑΛΑΙΟ 4 ΥΨΗΛΗ ΚΟΙΝΩΝΙΑ: ΜΙΑ ΙΣΤΟΡΙΑ ΚΑΙ ΕΝΑΣ ΟΔΗΓΟΣ
ΚΕΦΑΛΑΙΟ 5 ΔΙΠΛΟ ΜΕΙΚΤΟ ΩΣ ΣΥΝΗΘΩΣ
ΚΕΦΑΛΑΙΟ 6 ΠΡΟΣΩΠΙΚΟ ΤΟΠΙΟ
ΚΕΦΑΛΑΙΟ 7 ΚΑΘΡΕΦΤΕΣ
ΚΕΦΑΛΑΙΟ 8 Ο ΠΥΡΓΟΣ ΤΟΥ ΠΡΟΣΠΕΡΟΥ
ΚΕΦΑΛΑΙΟ 9 Η ΑΝΑΚΤΗΜΕΝΗ ΠΟΛΗ
ΕΠΙΛΟΓΟΣ ΑΠΟΣΠΑΣΜΑ ΑΠΟ ΤΗΝ ΑΛΕΞΑΝΔΡΕΙΑ
Πηγές, Βιβλιογραφία, Ευχαριστίες, Σημειώσεις

Genres: History, Egypt, Nonfiction, Travel, Alexandria, Historical, Classics

553 pages, Paperback

First published August 6, 2004

About the author

Michael Haag, who lived in London, was a writer, historian and biographer. He wrote widely on the Egyptian, Classical and Medieval worlds; and on the Mediterranean and the Middle East.

Reviews

[Liam Ostermann · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a book about an Alexandria that doesn't exist anymore, in a sense it never really existed for most of its inhabitants. It was the Alexandria that was the summer capital of khedive's and king's of Egypt during Britain's long colonial protectorate. Between the end of WWI and immediately after WWII it was the city of E M Forester, Constantine Cavafy and Lawrence Durrell (although Durrell was a giant of English literature in the estimation of the 20th century I am not sure about his reputation in 21st. I doubt if he as familiar to readers in 2023 as he was when this book was written). It was a city with an extraordinary history and, in those years, a cosmopolitan veneer and international population that allowed a vibrant culture to develop amongst it's varied members.

The problem was that that world, that literary, artistic and mercantile culture that flourished and produced Cavafy and provided inspiration to Durrell included everybody but the native Egyptians. They were everywhere and nowhere, or at least nowhere that mattered, although that is not quite true. They were there on the streets, working everywhere on the docks, in the fields, on the streetcars (were Forster met his Egyptian lover) in the bushes outside Shepard's Hotel waiting to be bedmates to officials and tourists - all white, all European. Even King Farouk's palaces were full of them, sweeping floors, cooking food, fetching and carrying things, but when it came to the king's advisors, pimps and cronies they were Italians. Albanians, Greeks anything but Egyptian.

So the Egyptians created the wealth and supplied the labour on which everything thrived and flourished but they were, except for the odd Pasha, never seen in the salons, clubs, businesses, mansions and places of entertainment that other other Alexandria inhabited. It is amazing that it came a surprise to so many of them that, having no time or interest in Egyptians when they had the power, the Egyptians had no time for them when the world hanged and they had the power.

Knowing this one can't but praise the way this book resurrects and brings to life a vanished world. But it's vision is limited and he doesn't really see so much that was there. Like the beautiful people of cosmopolitan Alexandria.

[James Murphy · Rating 4 out of 5]

E. M. Forster arrived in Alexandria in 1915. Lawrence Durrel left in 1945. The years in between are the concern of Michael Haag's book Alexandria: City of Memory. For the literary figures Haag writes about, it became city of love, too. Not only did they find strong individual muses, the city itself acted as muse to them and to one other, C. P. Cavafy, already, when Forster arrived, in full bloom as poet of the historical, exotic, and hauntingly erotic atmosphere permeating the streets and neighborhoods like a fog. Forster was in mid-career, his best work ahead of him. He was compelled to stay there to avoid the war and induction into the service awaiting him if he returned to England. While gladly surrendering to Alexandria's charms he also found romance with a young tram conductor. Durrell was a poet and novelist spat out by wartime Europe onto Alexandria's warm beaches and into the lively blend of Hellenic and Arabic cultures. The people he met combined with the city to create a thick magical stew of ideas which he later hammered into The Alexandria Quartet, originally inspired by the woman he met there, Eve Cohen, the model for Justine. Alexandria: City of Memory is a cultural, literary, and social history of the times and the city told largely through those 3 towering literary figures. Not only does his text tell it well, but a generous number of photos and maps are scattered through it for support. It's a lovely book to read and spend time with. I knew nothing about Forster's years there and very little of Cavafy's biography, so this was all fresh soil for my garden. Durrell's story is more familiar. Haag's chapters Durrell in Alexandria describe very well the spell cast on him by the city and by the colorful inhabitants with whom he mixed. Though the book ends with Durrell's and Eve's departure, there is a kind of coda in which Haag uses the 1956 Suez crisis as a convenient cork to put in his bottle. That event pretty much marked the end of British lifestyle and influence, which had been disappearing for years. Good read.

[Randy Mcdonald · Rating 4 out of 5]

I reviewed this book on my blog back in 2004, and Michael Haag's recent book Alexandria: City of Memory remains a book I'm fond of. Not only is it a composite biography of the great writers Forster, Cavafy, and Durrell in the light of their experiences in the Egyptian metropolis of Alexandria, but it is an ambitious sociological and historical study of Alexandria during its cosmopolitan period. Haag cites two French-language titles, Alexandrie entre deux mondes (edited by Robert Ilbert, published in Aix-en-Provence in 1988) and Alexandrie 1860-1960 (edited by Ilbert and Ilios Yannakakis, published in Paris in 1992), as the only comparable texts; certainly I've no reason to doubt this, or the completeness of Haag's survey of the different foreign communities. Haag's Alexandria serves as a superb introduction to an oft-overlooked corner of history that prefigures and criticizes the early 21st century's own shaky cosmopolitan transnationalism.

Alexandria begins with an anecdote, with Durrell's return to Alexandria in October of 1977 as part of a film project ( Spirit of Place ). Durrell, it seems, was tremendously depressed by the appearance of the city that he loved.

The city seemed to him listless and spiritless, its harbour a mere cemetery, its famous cafés, Pastroudis and Baudrot, no longer twinkled with music and lights. "For posters and advertisements have vanished, everything is in Arabic; in our time, film posters were billed in several languages with Arabic subtitles, so to speak." [. . .] All about him lay Iskandariya, the uncomprehensible Arabic of its inhabitants translatable only into emptiness.

What was the Alexandria that Durrell remembered?



The Alexandria of Durrell's memory--and of Forster's, and of Cavafy's, and of millions of others through lived experience and second-hand knowledge--was a city with a cosmopolitan reputation that its exceptionally cosmopolitan Hellenistic and early Roman past. At its peak, Alexandria was home to a half-million people including large Greek and Jewish populations, and was the main portal For any number of reasons, the city declined after the Arab conquest; by the time that Napoleon arrived in Egypt with his armies in 1798, only five thousand people lived in what was then little more than a village.

Alexandria revived only as a consequence of the efforts of Mehmet Ali to modernize Egypt. The capital earned for the Egyptian state by exports, particularly of the cotton grown in the Nile delta, played a crucial role in the Albanian dynast's plans; Alexandria, despite its desolation, retained an excellent harbour. The digging of the Mahmoudiya Canal in 1819-1820, connecting Alexandria's harbour to the Nile river, allowed the city to enjoy a marked revival, as the interface between Egypt and a Western-dominated Mediterranean.

For the first century of its history, at least, Alexandria occupied an interstitial position "at Egypt but not in it" (17). Alexandria's prosperity depended on its connections with its popoulous hinterland in the Nile valley, and for no substantial length of time did the city's Arab population find itself a minority. By the same measure, Alexandria's prosperity also depended heavily upon the immigration of Europeans--British, French, Greeks, Italians--to provide, if not the technical skills lacking in Egypt, at least the raw labour needed to connect the Nile valley's economy with that of the wider Mediterranean world. At the beginning of the 19th century, Egypt was if anything underpopulated, with only three million people and a rather sedentary population; mobile foreign labour was essential if Egypt was to grow.

Within a century of Alexandria's restoration, the city boasted a population of a half-million people, of which between one-quarter and one-third were foreigners: European Christians, Armenians, Jews, and members of other minorities. Capitulations were granted to the stronger foreign communities, legal concessions on the model of those granted in the Ottoman Empire proper which granted these communities near-complete independence from the Egyptian state, with foreign consuls running their own legal and governing systems in miniature for their country's expatriates. In the 1860s and 1870s, as Egypt's modernization faltered and foreign debts accumulated, a nationalist movement arose; when violent anti-foreign riots broke out in Alexandria in 1881, a British protectorate was swiftly imposed over the country.

Alexandria remained cosmopolitan--in the sense of being pluralistic and multicultural--throughout the period of British presence, from 1882 to 1956. Alexandria was, politically as well as culturally, semi-autonomous from Egypt; municipally self-governing from 1890 on, possessing a population that was decidedly confusing from the ethnographic and political perspectives (at one end one-quarter of ethnic Greeks were not Greek citizens; at the other the French consulate happily extended citizenship to almost anyone who asked), and multilingual, with French and English vying for supremacy while Italian persisted among some working classes and Arabic remained the suppressed vernacular. This cosmopolitanism, the Alexandrians examined by Haag seem to have known, was ultimately fragile, depending on British support against the mass of natives. But still, for more than a half-century modern Alexandria seemed to reflect the glories of the Alexandria that enjoyed such prominence in the Classical era.





E.M. Forster took refuse in Alexandria on his return from India in October 1916. The city ended up taking on much greater importance in his life, ironically enough given how he was initially opposed to the cosmopolitanism embodied in Alexandria. In Howard's End , for instance, Forster described urban life and modernity as fundamentally sterile and terribly destructive of authentic human relations. Nonetheless, he authored in causing him to write Alexandria: A History and a Guide , a document that is still in print as much for its insights on the city and its country as for its outdated if entertaining advice to tourists.

More importantly for Forster's evolution, it was in Alexandria that he fell in love for the first time, at almost 40 years of age, with the young streetcar attendant Mohammed el Adl. Alexandria was a somewhat more forgiving place for a homosexual--more cultural ambiguity, more anonymity--than contemporary London, allowing him what was a remarkable degree of emotional freedom. In Alexandria, Forster was able for the first time to fulfill his dictum in Howard's End, that one needed "[o]nly connect . . . and human love will be seen at its highest. Live in fragments no longer. Only connect and the beast and the monk, robbed of the isolation that is life to either, will die."

Forster knew Constantine Cavafy, meeting him in 1917 when the Greek poet was 54. Cavafy suffered a personal isolation similar to that of Forster's, compounded by his sense of a broader sense of national and municipal loss. At the time, Alexandria's Greek community readily surpassed Athens', in wealth and in cultural prestige; Cavafy did not call himself a "Greek (Hellene)" but rather a "Greek (Hellenic)", relating his ethnicity not to that of the minor southeastern European nation-state but to the much vaster and older Greek diaspora. Though he was born in Egypt, he was disassociated from his native land: he spoke no Arabic, expressed little interest in ancient Egypt, had no Egyptian friends, took no Arab sexual partners.

Haag convincingly demonstrates that Cavafy knew, though, that the Hellenic diaspora in the eastern Mediterranean was doomed, by the growth of local nationalisms, by the expansion of the Greek nation-state, and by the fatal conjunction of the two. The critical moment for him came in the Greco-Turkish War of 1921-1922, which ended not only with a crushing Greek military defeat but with the expulsion of almost all of the Greeks from the Hellenic communities three millennia old on the eastern shore of the Aegean. In February of 1922, Cavafy wrote the archly mournful "Those Who Fought for the Achaean League":

Valiant are you who fought and fell gloriously;
fearless of those who were everywhere victorious.
Blameless, even if Diaeos and Critolaos were at fault.
When the Greeks want to boast,
"Our nation turns out such men" they will say
of you. And thus marvellous will be your praise. --

Written in Alexandria by an Achaean;
in the seventh year of Ptolemy Lathyrus.

Durrell's experience of Alexandria occurred almost a generation after those of Forster and Cavafy. Durrell, of course, was heterosexual, and the sanction of his heterosexuality ensured that his relationships would meet with decidedly more favourable outcomes. In Durrell's biography, Alexandria played a critical role in his romantic life: Durrell lost his first wife, evacuated with him and their child from the Greek island of Corfu, in Alexandria; he found his second wife, the beautiful Jewish woman Eve Cohen, in Alexandria; almost two decades later, he met his third wife, Claude-Marie Vincendon, an Alexandrian expatriate, as he was tiring of Cyprus, the second-last enclave of cosmopolitan in the eastern Mediterranean behind Lebanon.

More importantly, Durrell wrote at a time when Alexandria's cosmopolitan culture was breaking down. That his introduction to Alexandria coincided with the Second World War is telling. Though Alexandria and Egypt's Nilotic core were never directly affected by the war, distant battles like El Alamein and threats of air raids aside, the war did signal the beginning of the decline of Britain, which lost interest in Egypt to the extent that the Capitulations had been abolished in 1937 by mutual agreement. The Second World War proved quite conclusively that regardless of the merits, total warfare did a superlative job of breaking down cosmopolitan transnational cultures elsewhere in the world. Already in the eastern Mediterranean, the creation of the Greek nation-state in the century after the first Greek national rebellion hinted at the impending doom of the city's Hellenes, simply because of the irresistible superiority of a consolidated national society numbering in the millions over a dispersed and vulnerable diaspora with nodes numbering in the tens or hundreds of thousands.

What one nation-state's existence did a single diasporic community reconfigured as a secondary offshoot in Egypt, the growth of a new sort of Egyptian nationalism did for all of Alexandria's diasporic communities. The failure of liberal constitutionalism over the mid-290th century coincided with the growth of a new sort of nationalism, grounded in an Arab identity that demanded the intensification of Egypt's links with the surrounding Arab world at the expense the country's minority communities, particularly those with foreign connections. For instance, although the Italians--according to Haag--were subjected to a high rate of assimilation into the Muslim Arab working classes of Alexandria, they remained a prominent component of the Alexandrian population; here, the growth of an expansionistic Italian nationalism under Fascism endangered the Italian presence on Egypt's Mediterranean shore. The growth of the Jewish settlements in nearby Mandatory Palestine, in the meantime, led to the growth of a popular opinion distrustful of the Jews, despite the fact that Alexandrian Jews tended to be criticized by Zionist visitors for their lack of interest in a Jewish nation-state. As unquestionably Egyptian as they were, Copts came under doubt because of their religion. And, of course, the citizens of Britain and France living in Egypt were tainted by their states' colonialist pasts.

The end of cosmopolitan Alexandria was swift. The post-war decline of western Europe coincided with the growth of radical Arab nationalism in Egypt, culminating in 1956 with the failure of the Anglo-French-Israeli invasion of Egypt (at one point, Alexandria was considered but dismissed as a target of the Anglo-French fleets). The subsequent mass emigration of the denizens of cosmopolitan Alexandria, and the nationalization of foreign property by the Nasserist state, was likely a foregone conclusion. In the meantime, the continuing urbanization of the Egyptian population led to the almost tenfold growth of the city's population, now almost entirely Arabic in language and Muslim in religion. Alexandria has been, at long last, assimilated into Egypt. Haag concludes that "the city is haunted by a sense of vacancy, for almost all the citizens of cosmopolitan Alexandria have long since gone away, leaving a new people with memory to inhabit the carcasses of others' lives" (350). All that remains, Haag grimly concludes, are the cemeteries of the dead.





Haag's account of cosmopolitan Alexandria is compelling, and not only because it represents a historical what-if that's decidedly attractive in the era when geopoliticians and armchair strategists eagerly plot out civilizational clashes. Liminal spaces are loci of creativity; the existence of liminal spaces in a given state's territory implies good things about its tolerance for imperfections, for shadings of identity and loyalty falling between the bright primary colours inscribed on passports and flags. Haag provides proof that Egypt was entirely capable of this, and not only by citing the persons of Saad Zaghloub and Taha Hussein, secular nationalists in Egypt who argued--ironically enough, contrary to the arguments of Western colonists--that there was no clash of cultures inherent.

This narrative of cosmopolitan Alexandria, though, fails on two accounts. The first and relatively minor, one is that it focuses entirely on the notables in the foreign communities of Alexandria, on the writers and the socialites and the prominent businessmen and on the passing worthies of global notes. Haag didn't intend to write a sociological tome, surely, but he demonstrates adequately that cosmopolitan Alexandria was as diverse socioeconomically as it was ethnopolitically. The lower classes of Alexandria's foreign communities are notable mainly as implicit contrasts to the important people who are the subjects of his study. Why were Italians so prone to being Arabized and Italianized? What made Armenians and Persians and Greeks seek French citizenship so avidly? How well-off were the foreign communities? You won't find the answers in Alexandria.

Far more importantly, Haag shares with his historical subjects a telling indifference to the Arabs of Alexandria. Haag at least mentions the presence, in cosmopolitan Alexandrian society, of members of other Western nationalities--Americans, Germans, Turks, Russians, Hungarians. The Arabs of Alexandria, who always formed the city's majority population and that formed the overwhelming majority of Egypt's total population of 24 million in 1950, scarcely feature in Haag's survey at all save as a source of cheap labour, local colour, and political menace. Cavafy made a point of looking to immigrant Greeks for sexual partners; Durrell's second and third wives were of recent immigrant stock; and Forster's Muhammad, an Egyptian, is shown in Forster's own letters and diaries to have been ambivalent, reluctant to commit sexually and accusing Forster of not taking him seriously as an equal partner. Egypt's King Farouk is the singular exception, late in this period, and the details of his presence--marked by his enthusiastic hunting and his political scheming and his humiliating domination by foreigners--are telling.

Haag makes a very strong case that Alexandria in the century before the catastrophe of 1956 possessed a complex and vital culture. What he singularly fails to demonstrate is that the majority of Alexandrians were particularly attached to this culture. It shouldn't be very surprising that cosmopolitan Alexandria's collapse was so complete, given how the majority of the Alexandrian population was never included in the ranks of this culture. The collapse of cosmopolitan Alexandria might have been inevitable. I'd go so far as to wonder whether Alexandrians should have cared, or should care, about the homogenization of their city. What did the Arabs think of all this? The failure of Haag's Alexandria to answer this question--to even recognize the question's existence before the book's end, which documents the Nasserist revolution and its dissolution of these communities is the only reason I didn't give this book a higher rating.

[John Ratliffe · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a gorgeous book of copiously annotated photographs reflecting the long and glorious history of one of the greatest cities in history. Alexandria was founded by Alexander the Great in 331 BC and it developed as a Hellenistic (Greek) city on the North African seacoast, where all races and languages gathered over the centuries. Its development was driven by attracting the world's greatest scientists and intellectuals over a long history. There the greatest library in the world held nearly one million books (scrolls).

Ancient Alexandria became the primary seat of learning of the world for centuries, until its renowned library and museum were incrementally destroyed by the Romans, Jews, Christians, and Muslims, each fighting the others. In an essay I wrote some years ago I claimed that the loss of ancient Alexandria probably set human intellectual progress back 1,000 years.

This book displays high quality photos reflecting the city both ancient and modern. For example, it shows the famous Cecil Hotel which still sits on the square where Cleopatra is thought to have committed suicide. All of the city's landmarks are on display for the reader, including the haunts of that great writer, Lawrence Durrell, whose novels, "The Alexandria Quartet," are studied in universities around the world. I am happy to say that I have accumulated literature on Durrell and Alexandria for the last 50 years and my shelf now holds dozens of items.

Those who would be interested in this great city and this literature should not pass this book up.

[Despoina Despoina · Rating 5 out of 5]

Εκδόσεις Πατάκη 2018, μετάφραση Αντώνης Καλοκύρης

[Asif · Rating 5 out of 5]

An academic book (published by Yale University Press) this is a wonderfully well written and researched book which serves as both a history of the city of Alexandria and specifically its history in the first half of the 20th century as seen through the writings and lives of EM Forster, Constantine Cavafy and Lawrence Durrell (all of whom lived for some time in Alexandria) and, In particular, it is a perfect companion piece to Durrell’s Alexandria Quartet. For fans of Justine and the other novels of that quartet it is essential. What I really enjoyed was learning about the identities of the real life figures upon whom the characters in Durrell’s Alexandria Quartet were based.

[Keith Miller · Rating 5 out of 5]

Of the triumvirate of Alexandrian literary giants of the early twentieth century - Constantine Cavafy, E. M. Forster, and Lawrence Durrell - Cavafy is perhaps the guardian spirit. His poetry provides the capstone to Forster's Alexandria: A History and a Guide, and is present both as invoked persona ("the old poet of the city") and fictionalized character (Balthazar) in Durrell's Alexandria Quartet. Cavafy's presence also haunts Michael Haag's evocative Alexandria: City of Memory. Though the book focuses on the Alexandria of Forster and Durrell, the photograph of Cavafy's melancholy face seems to stare through every page, and his poem "The City," used as epigraph, imbues the text with nostalgia. The image Haag describes of Cavafy at twilight opening or closing shutters, "adjusting the fall of light on his guests," aptly describes Haag's approach to his material, illuminating the sojourns of Forster and Durrell in this city.

Both Forster and Durrell were cast into Alexandria by wars: Forster came as a Red Cross "searcher" in World War I, interviewing wounded soldiers to ascertain the whereabouts of the missing; Durrell fled the Nazi invasion of Greece. In Alexandria both found the loves that, if not the most inspiring of happiness, nevertheless provided the foundation for some of their greatest writing. Forster fell in love with a tram conductor, Mohammed al Adl, and their tenuous, fraught relationship is movingly recounted in Forster's long "letter," never sent, and continued after Mohammed's death at twenty-three from consumption. Their relationship, transformed, underlies Forster's acclaimed A Passage to India, informing both Dr. Aziz's friendship with Fielding, and the misunderstandings between Aziz and Adela Quested. Perhaps the most strangely stirring image in Haag's book is the tattered photograph of Mohammed that Forster kept with him to the end of his life, preserved only because he had taped a tram ticket to the reverse side.

The eponymous central character of Durrell's Justine is based on his second wife, the Alexandrian Jew Eve Cohen. They met at a party, where she terrified and entranced Durrell with her voluble eagerness and puckish beauty. Eve was involved with an Austrian Jew who didn't feel he could trust her, and Durrell had recently ended his first marriage, so they initially discussed their difficult love lives. But when Eve left her family, it was to Durrell that she turned; they were soon lovers, and then married. Their relationship, lopsided, passionate, scarred by violence, is evoked in Haag's book through Durrell's letters, the memories of friends, and interviews with Eve Durrell.

A host of minor characters fills out the book, which is assiduously researched, lucidly written, and accompanied by a trove of photographs that bring to life this fleeting, fascinating epoch of Alexandria's history.

[Victor · Rating 5 out of 5]

A literary walk with this colourful and cosmopolitan ancient lady on the shores of the Mediterranean, whose past glories are long faded into the setting sun of empires, it's peoples and their changing souls.

[Lucynell · Rating 5 out of 5]

Book 18


Alexandria: City of Memory
Michael Haag
2004

5/5


There aren't many books about what is called the cosmopolitan Alexandria, roughly the years between 1870 and 1960. There's one called Alexandrian Cosmopoliranism: An Archive by Hala Halim but it costs like 60 euro, on kindle, and I have neither so let's wait a while.

This one is not exclusively about that era but it covers a good deal of it, and of a lot more, too. Neither E. M. Forster nor Lawrence Durrell were Alexandrians, neither lived there for more than a few years, but both are rightly considered as the most important literary figures of the city, along with Cavafy, who was, possibly, more Alexandrian than the city itself. These three are the book's main focus. How the city influenced their work and why. The lives they lived there and the people who surrounded them, friends, lovers, families. There's also, like Forster's Guide, some history, and a guide. What a city this was. Like our three protagonists, a bundle of contradictions, good and bad, ugly and beautiful, tender, violent, honest and deceitful.

[Francis Underwood · Rating 5 out of 5]

Been there, done that! When I was in Alexandria the book followed me ... No special justification is needed! A magnificent book.-

[Khalid · Rating 4 out of 5]

الاسكندرية، الأميرة والعاهرة، والمدينة الملكية والمؤخوة، فلن تتغير هذه المدينة أبداً، طالما استمر هياج الأعراق هنا مثل العفن في الراقود.
وبدلاً من التقاط الصور في فيلات فخمة تغطيها النباتات المزهرة حيث كان يقيم نسيم وجوستين حفلاتهما، باتت مهجورة او صودرت او تركت التردي بسبب فقر أصحابها.وتجد البوابات الحديدية الصدئة مفتوحة علي مصراعيها علي حدائق مهملة حيث فسقيات المياه الرخامية والتماثيل المتهشمة تشهد علي ما كانت تحمل هذه الفيلات من عظمة في الماضي....
كتاب يعرف بكفافيس وفورستر وداريل الذين عاشوا في الاسكندريه وأعمالهم... كتاب طويل ممتع عن مدينة الاسكندريه في بدايات القرن العشرين الي منتصفه تقريباً...

[Bettie]

to delve a little further into the gen on this