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Caesar's Vast Ghost: Aspects Of Provence
Lawrence Durrell lived in Provence for 30 years. It is the motif of this, his last work, which was published just before his death in 1990. Preserving memories from his intimate experience of the Midi, the book also includes 19 poems inspired by the region.
181 pages, Paperback
First published November 5, 1990
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About the author
Lawrence Durrell
324 books892 followersLawrence George Durrell was a critically hailed and beloved novelist, poet, humorist, and travel writer best known for The Alexandria Quartet novels, which were ranked by the Modern Library as among the greatest works of English literature in the twentieth century. A passionate and dedicated writer from an early age, Durrell’s prolific career also included the groundbreaking Avignon Quintet, whose first novel, Monsieur (1974), won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, and whose third novel, Constance (1982), was nominated for the Booker Prize. He also penned the celebrated travel memoir Bitter Lemons of Cyprus (1957), which won the Duff Cooper Prize. Durrell corresponded with author Henry Miller for forty-five years, and Miller influenced much of his early work, including a provocative and controversial novel, The Black Book (1938). Durrell died in France in 1990.
The time Lawrence spent with his family, mother Louisa, siblings Leslie, Margaret Durrell, and Gerald Durrell, on the island of Corfu were the subject of Gerald's memoirs and have been filmed numerous times for TV.
The time Lawrence spent with his family, mother Louisa, siblings Leslie, Margaret Durrell, and Gerald Durrell, on the island of Corfu were the subject of Gerald's memoirs and have been filmed numerous times for TV.
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Displaying 1 - 21 of 21 reviews
July 31, 2021
The first chapters start off well and promise an interesting perspective on the history and the genius of Provence, before going seriously astray and exploding into delirious , pretentious nonsense in the conclusion.
The best chapters are those on the Greek and particularly Roman history of Provence (Caesar, Marius, Agrippa, Mark Anthony), and the excellent and surprisingly enthralling distinction between Spanish and Provenzal corridas. Several landscape descriptions are particularly fine. The chapter on black magic esoteria is disquieting and extremely unsatisfactory, while the clunky chapter on courtly love has interesting bits but fails to jell or flow. The author also randomly inserts some of his poems, which I found to be excruciatingly pedantic and tiresome and, in my opinion should be skipped on sight.
I first read The Alexandria Quartet when I was a teenager and found it rich and inspiring. Years later I came across Monsieur which greatly disillusioned me. This book reminds me of the Lawrence Durrell mercilessly lampooned in Gerald Durrell, his brother's My family and other animals childhood recollections about life in Corfu: drinking far too much wine with larger than life outré writers and artists endlessly spinning strange, incomprehensible and convoluted theories and anecdotes far too long into the night.
Caesar's Vast Ghost is a quirky, idiosyncratic, extremely uneven book. The best chapters After Valence (chapter 1), Bull worship (chapter 4), Caesar's vast ghost(chapter 5), and The story of Marius (chapter VII), sans poems, can be read on their own as extremely effective and memorable essays.
The best chapters are those on the Greek and particularly Roman history of Provence (Caesar, Marius, Agrippa, Mark Anthony), and the excellent and surprisingly enthralling distinction between Spanish and Provenzal corridas. Several landscape descriptions are particularly fine. The chapter on black magic esoteria is disquieting and extremely unsatisfactory, while the clunky chapter on courtly love has interesting bits but fails to jell or flow. The author also randomly inserts some of his poems, which I found to be excruciatingly pedantic and tiresome and, in my opinion should be skipped on sight.
I first read The Alexandria Quartet when I was a teenager and found it rich and inspiring. Years later I came across Monsieur which greatly disillusioned me. This book reminds me of the Lawrence Durrell mercilessly lampooned in Gerald Durrell, his brother's My family and other animals childhood recollections about life in Corfu: drinking far too much wine with larger than life outré writers and artists endlessly spinning strange, incomprehensible and convoluted theories and anecdotes far too long into the night.
Caesar's Vast Ghost is a quirky, idiosyncratic, extremely uneven book. The best chapters After Valence (chapter 1), Bull worship (chapter 4), Caesar's vast ghost(chapter 5), and The story of Marius (chapter VII), sans poems, can be read on their own as extremely effective and memorable essays.
September 11, 2016
This was an odd book to me. I bought it expecting a pretty straightforward travelogue interspersed with history (and maybe some natural history) of the region of southern France known as Provence. Quickly I found it wasn’t a typical travelogue. First of all, the author made that area his home rather than specifically writing about traveling there, though it was still a travelogue in the sense that it chronicled (not in chronological order though) the author’s experiences in Provence through the years.
Another odd thing was that the author didn’t simply describe the cities or the food of this part of France (though there was some of that), but rather told stories about the area that showed some special characteristic of the land or the author’s own experiences (again, as they related to Provence). These stories were as likely to feature say the Roman general Marius and his military campaign there as they were the author’s contemporary companion Aldo and their considerably less martial experiences. The stories often read as fiction, at least from the third person perspective, not always with a lot of dialogue, but were an interesting way to show Provence. The stories really reminded me of the famous line by Faulkner, "The past is never dead. It's not even past;” the past lives on in Provence, as I am sure it does in most lands, whether in the minds of the people of Provence, those who aren’t from Provence but journey there as tourists, or in the author’s own mind.
I think the most striking stories had to do with the ancient Greco-Roman world, how even today one can see and feel the presence of them in Provence on a daily basis. Not only of course are there the famous monuments and aqueducts, but the Roman world lives on in more subtle ways, just beneath the surface, such as the name of the village of Pourrieres, which possibly traces its name to the nearby Campi Putridi or Fields of Putrefaction, a place where in about 110 BC perhaps 100,000 Teuton and Ambron opponents, slain in battle, were left where they fell. That chapter was particularly interesting, as the author helped the reader see the land as Marius and his troops (and enemies) saw the land, writing of the “limestone precipices” at Orgon that “rise as walls sheer above the plain, now crowned by a church and a couple of ruined castles,” where Marius and his men watched the invading barbarians file past, or the problems faced by both men in movement through this “land of lagoons,” as much of the region of Provence Marius fought over was a domain where “a network of interlocking lagoons and lakes scribbled the whole verdant surface.”
These stories he tells, of magic and mythology and Roman conquest, to the author they seemed to be Provence itself, for “[t]o begin with, Provence seemed to be less of a geographical entity than an idea.” It was for centuries a land of “shifting contours, expanding and contracting in response to wars and migrations…” a land better defined by how the people acted, believed, and the nature of the landscape itself, a place of “cypresses and roasted tile roofs, with its ivy and honeysuckle, sycamore and serene plane trees,” with skies of “wounded blue” that are “unique to Provence,” where one might encounter peasant faces in the Saturday market with “all the poise and gravity of Roman medallions.”
As you might gather, Durrell is a poet and twenty poems are included in the book. The vast majority of the book is prose but even in writing prose the author usually saw Provence (and wrote about it) with a poet’s eye. Even it its most vexingly confusing (such as the final chapter of the book) it was always a delight to read. Again and again the images were vivid, Durrell writing of “dusty, sunburnt Arles at the end of its cobweb of motorways,” of the beautiful women of Arles with “their raven hair and flashing looks,” of the site of an ancient Roman battle that is a “quiet plain [that] drowses in the burning summer heat…[where] [e]agles turn in the dazed blue of the sky,” visiting at night “the owl-haunted garden of tombs” of Alyscamps, “once the most coveted burial ground for Christians in all Europe” and Les Baux, a plateau “encrusted with white crags and scrub…its present emptiness invests it with a tremendous and indeed sinister atmosphere,” a plateau where the “whole town seems to have been carved and shaped in lump sugar; the friable whitish stone easily answers to the mason’s chisel.”
He had an especially interesting and descriptive chapter describing the differences between French and Spanish bullfighting, a chapter I did not think I would like but did, taken as I was by his description of the French bulls, “spry little Camargue animals so famous for their gallantry and cunning…beautiful creatures [that] drift about like Stone Age messages – as if they had just materialized from the cave drawings of Aurignacian man.”
The author, when not telling stories, seemed to ramble a lot, writing about the nature of writing a travelogue, or writing in general, the importance of enjoying a good meal and fine wine, the nature of companionship or love or whether or not modernity was destroying Provence. At first these rambling asides felt distracting, but not only were they easy to read I found I was both captured by the often beautiful imagery of many of these passages and discovered that these rambling asides were in a way telling the reader something about the lifestyle and philosophy of those who call Provence home. Very sly!
I don’t think I scratched my itch so to speak to get great historical information about Provence. I will have to look elsewhere for that. I did come away with an appreciation of one gifted writer’s feel of the spirit of the place, perhaps something that would not be well captured in a more prosaic look at Provence’s history and architecture.
Another odd thing was that the author didn’t simply describe the cities or the food of this part of France (though there was some of that), but rather told stories about the area that showed some special characteristic of the land or the author’s own experiences (again, as they related to Provence). These stories were as likely to feature say the Roman general Marius and his military campaign there as they were the author’s contemporary companion Aldo and their considerably less martial experiences. The stories often read as fiction, at least from the third person perspective, not always with a lot of dialogue, but were an interesting way to show Provence. The stories really reminded me of the famous line by Faulkner, "The past is never dead. It's not even past;” the past lives on in Provence, as I am sure it does in most lands, whether in the minds of the people of Provence, those who aren’t from Provence but journey there as tourists, or in the author’s own mind.
I think the most striking stories had to do with the ancient Greco-Roman world, how even today one can see and feel the presence of them in Provence on a daily basis. Not only of course are there the famous monuments and aqueducts, but the Roman world lives on in more subtle ways, just beneath the surface, such as the name of the village of Pourrieres, which possibly traces its name to the nearby Campi Putridi or Fields of Putrefaction, a place where in about 110 BC perhaps 100,000 Teuton and Ambron opponents, slain in battle, were left where they fell. That chapter was particularly interesting, as the author helped the reader see the land as Marius and his troops (and enemies) saw the land, writing of the “limestone precipices” at Orgon that “rise as walls sheer above the plain, now crowned by a church and a couple of ruined castles,” where Marius and his men watched the invading barbarians file past, or the problems faced by both men in movement through this “land of lagoons,” as much of the region of Provence Marius fought over was a domain where “a network of interlocking lagoons and lakes scribbled the whole verdant surface.”
These stories he tells, of magic and mythology and Roman conquest, to the author they seemed to be Provence itself, for “[t]o begin with, Provence seemed to be less of a geographical entity than an idea.” It was for centuries a land of “shifting contours, expanding and contracting in response to wars and migrations…” a land better defined by how the people acted, believed, and the nature of the landscape itself, a place of “cypresses and roasted tile roofs, with its ivy and honeysuckle, sycamore and serene plane trees,” with skies of “wounded blue” that are “unique to Provence,” where one might encounter peasant faces in the Saturday market with “all the poise and gravity of Roman medallions.”
As you might gather, Durrell is a poet and twenty poems are included in the book. The vast majority of the book is prose but even in writing prose the author usually saw Provence (and wrote about it) with a poet’s eye. Even it its most vexingly confusing (such as the final chapter of the book) it was always a delight to read. Again and again the images were vivid, Durrell writing of “dusty, sunburnt Arles at the end of its cobweb of motorways,” of the beautiful women of Arles with “their raven hair and flashing looks,” of the site of an ancient Roman battle that is a “quiet plain [that] drowses in the burning summer heat…[where] [e]agles turn in the dazed blue of the sky,” visiting at night “the owl-haunted garden of tombs” of Alyscamps, “once the most coveted burial ground for Christians in all Europe” and Les Baux, a plateau “encrusted with white crags and scrub…its present emptiness invests it with a tremendous and indeed sinister atmosphere,” a plateau where the “whole town seems to have been carved and shaped in lump sugar; the friable whitish stone easily answers to the mason’s chisel.”
He had an especially interesting and descriptive chapter describing the differences between French and Spanish bullfighting, a chapter I did not think I would like but did, taken as I was by his description of the French bulls, “spry little Camargue animals so famous for their gallantry and cunning…beautiful creatures [that] drift about like Stone Age messages – as if they had just materialized from the cave drawings of Aurignacian man.”
The author, when not telling stories, seemed to ramble a lot, writing about the nature of writing a travelogue, or writing in general, the importance of enjoying a good meal and fine wine, the nature of companionship or love or whether or not modernity was destroying Provence. At first these rambling asides felt distracting, but not only were they easy to read I found I was both captured by the often beautiful imagery of many of these passages and discovered that these rambling asides were in a way telling the reader something about the lifestyle and philosophy of those who call Provence home. Very sly!
I don’t think I scratched my itch so to speak to get great historical information about Provence. I will have to look elsewhere for that. I did come away with an appreciation of one gifted writer’s feel of the spirit of the place, perhaps something that would not be well captured in a more prosaic look at Provence’s history and architecture.
May 29, 2022
Durrells literair-historische beschrijving van de Romeinse Provence.
March 7, 2014
Durrell is at his best when relating historical scenes. The way he describes Roman generals, functionaries, and soldiers all traipsing about Southern France gives the impression that they were there just yesterday, and that we missed meeting them due to a minor scheduling conflict.
November 7, 2021
An unusual book--includes travelogue, historical musings, a bit of memoir, and some poetry. It's a very personal book, and I probably would have liked it if I had liked Lawrence Durrell's personality. Unfortunately, I found him off-putting, particularly in his attitude toward women. He also dwelt on sex more than was interesting. I did learn something about classical Rome and Provence, though I couldn't help but take those nuggets with a grain of salt.
June 12, 2021
A late piece (1990) of ‘travel writing’ from Lawrence Durrell, and not one that, for me, lives up to his much earlier books on Corfu, Rhodes and Cyprus. It smacks of a man turning out something to keep a few bob coming in, and, while doubtless written about the area of France – Provence – where he had settled and which he loved, it feels as if the inspiration has gone out of him. It’s almost as if, like Coleridge, he sees the landscape ‘so excellently fair’, but cannot ‘feel’ how beautiful it is. Or at least if he can feel how beautiful it is, he’s lost the knack of conveying that.
Moreover, the narrative, encompassing history, philosophy, descriptions of countryside and towns is often presented in rather dull guide book style. I don’t think he ever adopts the style of ‘You will note the unusual architrave...’ or ‘It is worth making a small detour to visit...’, but it felt as if he was only narrowly avoiding it. And the narrative is interspersed with his poems written specially for this ‘guide’, which, as I usually find with Durrell, are unintelligible, or at least not on my wavelength.
I also disliked his fascination with his friend ‘Aldo the aristocrat and vine-grower in his tumbledown château’. This friend provides Durrell with plenty of Fitou and philosophical reflections and speculations which Durrell then quotes. To me they were utterly incomprehensible and therefore bore the characteristic of irrelevant dullness. Another friend, the ‘saintly tramp’, Jérôme, introduced early on as a man as significant as Aldo, was thereafter barely referred to. I kept waiting for him to reappear, but he scarcely ever did, and then only tangentially.
There also seemed to me a lot of repetition about canals and the importance of Arles and Marseilles in the ancient world which came to represent to me the rambling inconsequential structure of the whole. And although there’s a whole chapter dedicated to bull worship, bulls kept popping up distractingly.
One chapter I did, however, very much enjoy and that was ‘The Story of Marius’. Durrell reads up on his Tacitus and Plutarch and fashions his own version of the life and career of Caius Marius who from about 113 BC dealt with the insurgencies of Nordic ‘barbarians’ who were migrating into Roman territories in Gaul. This is a chapter which worked for me because Durrell goes into full-bodied storytelling mode. It was a relief to be excused from another set of ruminations on the importance of civilising Romanization in the forging of a European consciousness, ruminations which never reach any grand, defining conclusion. At least, if they did, this reader missed it.
The strength, for me, of ‘Reflections on a Marine Venus’ was Durrell’s capacity to tell stories – usually extended and often achingly nostalgic anecdotes – about people and their way of life and the landscapes in which they lived. I missed that in ‘Caesar’s Vast Ghost’: Aldo and Jérôme simply weren’t up to it, and they were not accompanied by the kind of lively incident that made Durrell’s account of Rhodes so vibrant. Instead, Faber seem to have been happy to opt for a glossy coffee-tablish sort of book, and, I’m sorry to say, filled it with rather random and poor quality photographs.
Moreover, the narrative, encompassing history, philosophy, descriptions of countryside and towns is often presented in rather dull guide book style. I don’t think he ever adopts the style of ‘You will note the unusual architrave...’ or ‘It is worth making a small detour to visit...’, but it felt as if he was only narrowly avoiding it. And the narrative is interspersed with his poems written specially for this ‘guide’, which, as I usually find with Durrell, are unintelligible, or at least not on my wavelength.
I also disliked his fascination with his friend ‘Aldo the aristocrat and vine-grower in his tumbledown château’. This friend provides Durrell with plenty of Fitou and philosophical reflections and speculations which Durrell then quotes. To me they were utterly incomprehensible and therefore bore the characteristic of irrelevant dullness. Another friend, the ‘saintly tramp’, Jérôme, introduced early on as a man as significant as Aldo, was thereafter barely referred to. I kept waiting for him to reappear, but he scarcely ever did, and then only tangentially.
There also seemed to me a lot of repetition about canals and the importance of Arles and Marseilles in the ancient world which came to represent to me the rambling inconsequential structure of the whole. And although there’s a whole chapter dedicated to bull worship, bulls kept popping up distractingly.
One chapter I did, however, very much enjoy and that was ‘The Story of Marius’. Durrell reads up on his Tacitus and Plutarch and fashions his own version of the life and career of Caius Marius who from about 113 BC dealt with the insurgencies of Nordic ‘barbarians’ who were migrating into Roman territories in Gaul. This is a chapter which worked for me because Durrell goes into full-bodied storytelling mode. It was a relief to be excused from another set of ruminations on the importance of civilising Romanization in the forging of a European consciousness, ruminations which never reach any grand, defining conclusion. At least, if they did, this reader missed it.
The strength, for me, of ‘Reflections on a Marine Venus’ was Durrell’s capacity to tell stories – usually extended and often achingly nostalgic anecdotes – about people and their way of life and the landscapes in which they lived. I missed that in ‘Caesar’s Vast Ghost’: Aldo and Jérôme simply weren’t up to it, and they were not accompanied by the kind of lively incident that made Durrell’s account of Rhodes so vibrant. Instead, Faber seem to have been happy to opt for a glossy coffee-tablish sort of book, and, I’m sorry to say, filled it with rather random and poor quality photographs.
May 9, 2014
This book was first published in 1990, a few days before Durrell’s death. He had settled in France in 1957 and the pages draw on a deep understanding of his adopted country.
The goodreads edition is called “Provence” and is labelled “travel” by the publisher. My own edition (2002) is entitled “Caesar’s Vast Ghost - Aspects of Provence”, which offers a clearer idea of the content. The journey is more temporal than spatial. Durrell warns of “unanswerable questions about the Roman Thing and the Greek, not to mention the Crusader Thing and the Troubadour Thing”. So it is that we meet Tiberius and Agrippa, Galen, Mistral and Rabelais; and also the writer’s living companions - Jérôme (a tramp by choice), the police surgeon and the threadbare aristocrat, Aldo.
There are many beautifully-shaped sentences but on first reading I found the language too perfumed. I was there for the subject-matter, for the understanding Durrell offers, and was too impatient to savour the words. A second, more leisured, reading brought more pleasure. So that’s my suggestion - take your time and enjoy each paragraph.
If I have given only three stars, it’s because the book seems to be torn between competing aims. Is it history? Certainly. A travel tome? To an extent. Autobiographical? Somewhat. Entirely factual? No. Prose? Not exclusively - twenty late poems are threaded through the volume. But the book allows us a final flowering from a respected writer and we must be grateful for that.
QUOTES
“The vineyards are stripped already, and the burly little crucifixes of vines had already responded to a freak snowfall with all their charcoal blackness and their withered forms .... They had their feet in snow.”
“Under a fertile limestone cliff topped by the now deserted Tour Magne wells up an extravagant arm of noiseless green water: thick, profuse and quite transparent, a flowing sleeve of green jade in whose opaque depths your eyes, when they get accustomed to the reflections, may well discern the votive coins and breast-pins and fragments of metal and tin tossed in by the modern pilgrims to the place, thus setting their seals upon a wish or a superstition, just as the ancient Romans or other pagans did of old.”
October 12, 2016
It can be painful to revisit an author one regarded highly at an earlier stage of one's life. As an adolescent, I loved Durrell and consciously modeled my prose on his (to predictably embarrassing results).
I'm afraid that I now think of Durrell as a writer of rather inconsistent gifts. This is not his best effort. To be fair, it does include some very well-observed set pieces, but his half-baked historical musings are bad, and most of the poetry is worse. Oddly, that I have been to Provence but never to Cyprus, I did not feel as drawn into the world he describes here as I did with Bitter Lemons.
I'm afraid that I now think of Durrell as a writer of rather inconsistent gifts. This is not his best effort. To be fair, it does include some very well-observed set pieces, but his half-baked historical musings are bad, and most of the poetry is worse. Oddly, that I have been to Provence but never to Cyprus, I did not feel as drawn into the world he describes here as I did with Bitter Lemons.
January 12, 2019
Uwielbiam.
August 16, 2019
Alternate Title: "Aspects of Provence, or, Mixed Meandering Musings, Pretentious Prose, Pedantic Poetry, and a Handful of Interesting Historical Details."
August 13, 2016
Rating: 3.5* of five
July 29, 2025
Some sparks of inspiration, but disappointing overall
I found this whilst searching for books to take on a trip to Provence last week and, having enjoyed Durrell's Sicilian Carousel on a visit to that island last year, decided to give it a go. It contains some interesting details for the curious traveller such as the difference between bullfighting in Spain and in Provence, bravura historical narrative (including a gripping account of how the Roman general Marius defeated the Teutones and Ambrones at the battle of Aquae Sextiae [i.e. Aix-en-Provence]) and illuminating descriptive passages like this [p1]:
"Swerving down those long dusty roads among the olive groves, down the shivering galleries of green leaf I came, driving 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."
However, I found that I was becoming impatient with the author's discursive style, as he wandered across topics such as the relationship between Christianity and the Roman religion it came to supplant, the sexual orientation of Julius Caesar and Cleopatra, and a final lengthy passage about a latex doll called Cunegonde ("the last pupil of the philosopher Demonax"), which I found peculiarly offensive (of course, it could be that the author was scaling peaks of erudition and allusion which I could not follow). I also found his poems (e.g. "Old men cry easily and wet their beds, / Incontinent in their dying as crowned heads / Death's keyhole they confront like newly weds." [p134]) hard to appreciate.
This book was published in 1990, the year of Durrell's death. I'd like to read more of him, but will proceed more cautiously now.
Originally reviewed 7 June 2016
I found this whilst searching for books to take on a trip to Provence last week and, having enjoyed Durrell's Sicilian Carousel on a visit to that island last year, decided to give it a go. It contains some interesting details for the curious traveller such as the difference between bullfighting in Spain and in Provence, bravura historical narrative (including a gripping account of how the Roman general Marius defeated the Teutones and Ambrones at the battle of Aquae Sextiae [i.e. Aix-en-Provence]) and illuminating descriptive passages like this [p1]:
"Swerving down those long dusty roads among the olive groves, down the shivering galleries of green leaf I came, driving 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."
However, I found that I was becoming impatient with the author's discursive style, as he wandered across topics such as the relationship between Christianity and the Roman religion it came to supplant, the sexual orientation of Julius Caesar and Cleopatra, and a final lengthy passage about a latex doll called Cunegonde ("the last pupil of the philosopher Demonax"), which I found peculiarly offensive (of course, it could be that the author was scaling peaks of erudition and allusion which I could not follow). I also found his poems (e.g. "Old men cry easily and wet their beds, / Incontinent in their dying as crowned heads / Death's keyhole they confront like newly weds." [p134]) hard to appreciate.
This book was published in 1990, the year of Durrell's death. I'd like to read more of him, but will proceed more cautiously now.
Originally reviewed 7 June 2016
November 16, 2025
I have enjoyed reading almost all of Lawrence Durrell's travelogues this past year. Most were on the Greek islands and Cyprus where he lived. He lived for several decades at the end of his life in Provence, France and this was his final book, published just after his death. I found it to be his most disappointing book. Despite the length of time spent there and the friendships formed, this seems to be his most impersonal book. Mainly, he brings out the history of the place. Added to my disappointment in his writing in this book was the fact that I ordered this book through ABEBooks and while it had been labeled in good shape, the previous owner had decided to add comments, black out one of his poems, and tear out most of Durrell's Conclusion. I am giving it this rating due to my lack of enjoyment of the previous chapters, but this did not help. Still, I am glad I have been able to be enlightened by so many of Lawrence Durrell's travelogues this past year, but if you skip one of them, skip this one.
March 22, 2023
There is no doubting the gifted Lawrence Durrell. Whether it is poetry, novels or travelogues he is a master of the language and focuses your mind throughout. I knew his brother Gerald, probably more famous than Lawrence and Lawrence was more than a little aware of this. However Lawrence is the more accomplished literary figure.
August 31, 2023
'it is more an idea than a place. you will find this out quite soon.'
- local informant in lawrence durrell's 'ceasar's vast ghost: aspects of provence'
I was reading provence in walthamstow
'all the secret histories make it clear
ceasar was once happy here.' runs one of durrell's doggerel poems.
it's a strange book - full of strange events (golden babies) and strange opinions. durrell was a strange man after all.
'the sun determines everything that grows, while water becomes an all important symbol...'
- local informant in lawrence durrell's 'ceasar's vast ghost: aspects of provence'
I was reading provence in walthamstow
'all the secret histories make it clear
ceasar was once happy here.' runs one of durrell's doggerel poems.
it's a strange book - full of strange events (golden babies) and strange opinions. durrell was a strange man after all.
'the sun determines everything that grows, while water becomes an all important symbol...'
June 1, 2021
Passages in French (and Im embarrassed to say some in English as well) are a bit obscure, either in historical reference or literary sense, and they abounded for me, but otherwise Durrell’s lyrical love letter to the part of the world where he spent so much of his life is rich in texture as the landscape is in vistas. The narration says as much about Durrell as about Aspects of Provence,but it will leave you longing to visit Nimes Arles Narbonne and Sommieres again soon.
Currently reading
July 19, 2012So far, enchanting.
February 26, 2013
As you can see I like Lawrence Durrell's work!
September 5, 2016
Zanim sięgniesz po tę książkę, najpierw sięgnij po butelkę wina. Będzie strawniejsza.
October 17, 2016
It was not my cup of tea even if it's a well written book. Nice narration which brings you images from Provence and which travels you back to Roman and Greek eras
December 19, 2023
2 ⭐️ Self-indulgent repetitive hodge-podge. A few paragraphs of sustained interest but these are few and far between.
Displaying 1 - 21 of 21 reviews