Sicilian Carousel

by Lawrence Durrell

Although Durrell spent much of his life beside the Mediterranean, he wrote relatively little about Italy; it was always somewhere that he was passing through on the way to somewhere else. Sicilian Carousel is his only piece of extended writing on the country and, naturally enough for the islomaniac Durrell, it focuses on one of Italy's islands. Sicilian Carousel came relatively late in Durrell's career, and is based around a slightly fictionalized bus tour of the island.

Genres: Travel, Nonfiction, Autobiography, Italy

Paperback

First published September 7, 1977

About the author

Lawrence 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.

Reviews

[Lyn Elliott · Rating 3 out of 5]

I haven't read Durrell for years, remember with some pride my determination to read The Alexandria Quartet and that I completed it. I never did manage The Avignon series that followed, but enjoyed his writings about Corfu and Crete, more in the genre we call travel writing but which are really books about place - culture, history, landscapes, food and smells.

Durrell was nearing the end of his writing life when he was persuaded to travel with a group to Sicily and to write about it - the quintessential Sicilian travel book, perhaps.

The Carousel of the title is the name of the tour that whizzes around the island in 10 days, barely stopping anywhere long enough for anyone to explore on their own, which Durrell and one of his tour companions, Deeds, would dearly like to do. I'm not sure whether any of the tour group are based on real individuals, or whether they are fictionalised versions of types that he had met over the years. In any event, they are an eccentric lot and the source of what humour there is.

Durrell's style now seems overly florid for the scale of his venture, though at the time it was published in 1976 reviews referred to his 'dazzling prose' and 'the style to describe what he sees as well as any prosodist currently writing'. The word 'prosodist' is a bit of a giveaway.

It's partly descriptive of what they see, partly anecdotal about the eccentricities of his fellow travellers (couldn't resist that, sorry) and partly meditations on ancient Greek history, myth, philosophy and Greek associations with Sicily. It's heavier going than it need be.

It has prompted me, however, to start reading John Julius Norwich's Sicily: An Island at the Crossroads of History which I'm enjoying immensely and in which Norwich wears his knowledge lightly. Wonderful stuff!

[Lynne King · Rating 5 out of 5]

I just love anything about Sicily; it's a magical island. Just forget about the Mafia. I also love the works of Lawrence Durrell, so a double delight.

This deserves an indepth review. Shortly I hope...

[Garnette · Rating 3 out of 5]

Lawrence Durrell has been on my (much too long) "to read" list for years, and I finally turned to this lesser known work in preparation for travel. Durrell took a package tour around Sicily by bus in the 1970s. He offers observations on the social dynamics among a group of idiosyncratic strangers thrust into close quarters, recollections of a dear, deceased friend who had lived in Sicily, and reflections on the unique history of the island and the sites visited. Benefiting from a classical education, Durrell easily connects what he sees to Greek and Roman history and literature in a way that seems both old fashioned and insightful. The book also reminded me (how quickly we forget!) how remarkably different travel is in the internet age. Travelers spend their free time in conversation, seizing on old newspapers to check on sports scores for games played last week, reading novels left behind by previous travelers, wandering the streets or just daydreaming. Cell phones, the internet and our always connected lives have changed all that.

[Sophie · Rating 2 out of 5]

I found this book quite boring. The beginning was quite interesting, with the descriptions of the others travellers (the french couple, the germans, the driver and so on), but after a while, it was just a sightseeing after another.
The life of the travellers was more interesting that the travel and Sicilia itself.
The best part of the book is the end, with Lawrence Durrell alone for a week in Sicilia, near the Etna, remembering his late friend Martine.

[John · Rating 4 out of 5]

A found this book to be entertaining but a warning for the unwary: apparently elements of the book are fictionalized. It is also different from most recent travel writing. Instead of a straightforward description of beautiful sites, practical advice on hotels and dining, and interactions with the "natives" (read any NYT Magazine of travel section article for a flavor), Durrell dispenses with practical advice and digresses frequently on long meditations about Mediterranean civilization as established by the ancient Greeks and reminisces about a recently deceased woman (lover?) who lived in Cyprus when he was there and died in Sicily. So I would say this is more of a meditation while on a whirlwind bus tour of the island. But all of the highlights are there along with some humor concerning his descriptions and interactions with the (fictionalized?) tour group.

[Danika · Rating 1 out of 5]

I didn't actually finish this book. After torturing myself for 150 pages, I finally set it aside. REALLY dry and boring. I kept soldiering on, just for the occasional tidbit about Sicily but really not worth the trouble.

[Susan Wester · Rating 5 out of 5]

A most read for anyone who has been to or is thinking of going to Sicily

[David Smith · Rating 5 out of 5]

Durrell is one of my favourite travel writers. This is one of his best (and there are many). If I ever make it to Sicily, Sicilian Carousel will be my guide.

[Benjamin Doughty · Rating 4 out of 5]

Was debating whether to give this four or five stars... still might come back and change my mind. Not sure whether it was just because I was reading it while on vacation in Sicily, or whether because I was already a committed Durrell fan, but I thought this book was really quite moving. The interesting thing about the Carousel is that, like all Durrell, it’s not really about Sicily (or even travel, as such) at all: rather, it’s about love and loss and place and how these are all bound up with each other. What’s notable is that the most poignant descriptions of the island don’t even come from Durrell himself, but rather are cribbed wholesale from the letters Martine sent him (although I’m sure these have been heavily edited to fit his themes better). But the fact that he experiences the island through these remnants of the past is especially fascinating, since Sicily itself is such a layered jumble of different dead civilizations and cultures (the Greeks, the Romans, the Byzantines, the Arabs, the Normans, the Germans, etc. etc.). So, as much of the book was (and my trip was) spent staring at piles of dead, indecipherable stone, trying to tell stories about it, we are also getting this filtered yet again through Martine’s letters. It’s possible that the only way to truly experience Sicily is through fragments and memories.

[Peter Allum · Rating 3 out of 5]

Travel writing with wonderful poetic touches, but also some dull stretches.

Published in 1977 when Durrell was 66, this partly fictionalized account of his participation in a group tour of Sicily is by turns comic, poetic, and the esoteric musings of a confirmed classicist.

I very much enjoyed the comedic descriptions of a very diverse tour group. Durrell has a gossipy way of describing his characters, perhaps a little cutting, but not offensively so. Thus, at the start of his tour he describes meeting a few of his travel companions:

"Immediately next to me was an aggrieved French couple with a small child who looked around with rat-like malevolence. He had the same face as his father. They looked like very cheap microscopes." (Very creative to describe people as microscopes, and Durrell refers to the family with this term through the book.)

While some might regard the comedic elements of Sicilian Carousel as commercial in comparison with his earlier novels, I found it refreshing. Judging by this publication, Durrell had perhaps mellowed in his 60s, and Carousel is less infected by an implied elitism--the sense that some men, scholars, or artists are "elect"--that I found in the first of Alexandria Quartet series, "Justine", published 20 years earlier.

Durrell's travel writing is delightfully poetic. Describing a scene or events, he picks just the right metaphor or adjectives to conjure up a fresh picture. For example:

"The crowd swayed and swelled, ebbed this way and that, just like batches of seaweed in a sea-grotto."

Together with the descriptive poetry, there is an underlying melancholy to Carousel relating to the transience of human life (as reflected in the passing of the ancient Greek civilization, the recent death of one of Durrell's close friends, and tragedies attributed to others in his travel group).

The weakness of Carousel for me was the esoteric nature of much of Durrell's writing on Greek culture and how Sicily was similar to the Greek islands with which he was familiar. Durrell was clearly a learned classicist and while his ideas are sometimes interesting, stretches of text come across as dry. I have sympathy with reviewers who were, at times, bored.

But, all in all, a nice little book.

[Marc Rolland · Rating 5 out of 5]

A very subtle and hard to appreciate little book for most casual readers nowadays. There are three strands in this narrative - the behaviour and vicissitudes of a group of international tourists visiting Sicily in the mid 1970s, when people still smoked in the bus, food was dull and nondescript when provided by the tour operator, depicted with humour and sensitivity by the author, who shares the limelight with a British vet of El Alamein vintage; the actual description of the sites, towns, monuments of Sicily, by a man whose life was spent in intimacy with the Greek Mediterranean; more difficult to follow and appreciate but in my opinion the principal allure of this work, the memory of a dear friend, Martine, who sent him letter after letter to attract him over to Sicily, where she had married a Sicilian. Alas, 'too late, too late !' as Christina Rossetti aptly wrote, Martine has died in the meantime, and the narrator is in fact visiting as on a pilgrimage the places where she lived, loved, and wrote, with only her letters in hand. This tragic, bittersweet dimension is heightened by references to their happy times together in Cyprus (see 'Bitter Lemons of Cyprus') where both were young, carefree, and Martine was intent on building and furnishing her perfect house. Durrells disclaimer about the reality of his characters is not to be taken at face value, Martine is Marie Millington-Drake, a tremendously gifted, strange, beautiful lady of many accomplishments, who built 'Villa Fortuna' on Cyprus, went on to marry a Sicilian aristocrat, and died at an early age.

[Jeremy Walton · Rating 4 out of 5]

Around and about
This is a personal account of a guided coach tour around Sicily. I read it last week during... a guided coach tour around Sicily. Both our itineraries visited roughly the same sites, including the Greek temples at Agrigento, the Roman villa at Casale and the Norman cathedral at Monreale; it was interesting to read Durrell's idiosyncratic views on what we were both seeing. He'd spent a long time in the Mediterranean, living in Corfu, Athens, Cairo and Cyprus, and knew a lot about Greek history and culture, but this was his first visit to Sicily. This was prompted by his late friend Martine, whose letters he quotes from throughout the trip. His accounts of his fellow travellers ("an Anglican bishop who'd developed Doubts" and who "spoke English as if he had a hot potato in his mouth", a French family who "looked like very cheap microscopes") are sharply drawn, and he accurately captures the highs and lows of time spent with strangers on a journey. I'd never read any of his books prior to this, and was only vaguely aware of his writing (he mentions in this book that so-called fans perpetually confuse him with his brother Gerald, the author of My Family and Other Animals), but found this a pleasant, stimulating companion to share the trip with.

Originally reviewed 26 May 2015

[Andy · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read this in 1998, in anticipation of a couple days to be spent in Sicily, and polished it off in a week. It was marvelous.

Durrell has an easy-reading style that makes consuming his works seem effortless, though to be rewarded, one needs to do some real work. But he keeps the literary, historical and artistic references internalized, so you need not have extensive prior knowledge of a place or period in order to understand the context. Understanding the meaning, of course, is something else altogether.

This was not the same experience of "swimming through velvet" that characterizes reading The Alexandria Quartet. But it carried for a kind of good humor that he could only hint at in those books. This being a travel narrative first and foremost, he had stripped away most of the sentimentality – but not all of it.

The deceased and anonymous "Martine" who pervades the book hinted at Darley's Justine of the Quartet. But it is much more Durrell in the first person, and somewhat less the romantic narrator Darley. Equally entertaining though, if not quite as compelling.

Bonus comment: This book contains one of my favorite "objectifications" (i.e., using an inanimate object to characterize a human). Describing a French couple that shared the tour bus with the narrator, he says that the husband "looked like a cheap knife." Pure gold.

[Hotspur · Rating 3 out of 5]

The prose sparkles, but not much else. I was expecting a Lawrence-like Twilight in Italy, or something like his good friend Henry Miller's Colossus of Maroussi, two of the best philosophical/cultural/personal travelogues of literature. Instead, this is a rather dull account of a package tour of Sicily. There's the occasional interesting thought or piece of poetic prose, but everything else is a lost opportunity. He sort of begins with discussing his companions on the package tour (which would have been interesting) but stops after a few pages, and instead only gives us a few lustful references to the young blonde german girl. And while the greek influence is strong in Sicily, and he was aware of it, I dont think he really ever expressed any truly interesting or revelatory thought ala Lawrence and Miller on this matter, despite his clearly thinking about it the entire trip. Not a bad read, but there's nothing really here to dig into.

[John Benson · Rating 4 out of 5]

It is hard to tell whether to call this a travelogue, which it is partly, but it is also a work of fiction, as the Sicilian Carousel is a tour made up of fictional people. Durrell wrote four books on Mediterranean islands--Cyprus, Corfu, Rhodes and now this book on Sicily. While in Cyprus, he had met Martine, who later moved to Sicily and she encouraged him to visit her there. But before he visited, she died, and this book includes an homage to her, a real person. The tour is made up of different archetypal people, but it is a good vehicle ("a small red bus") to bring out the different places in Sicily. Like with his other books, he intermixes mythology, history and landscape descriptions. Usually, he has local friends that help bring out the color of the different islands, but in this one, he uses his fellow travelers to help him bring out the place. The book works as a travelogue and a study of place and characters, even though much of it is fictional.

[Patty · Rating 3 out of 5]

I debated how to rate this book. I did not expect a travel guide, but was looking for something that would give me a sense of Sicily. Without a solid foundation of Greek poets, much of the author's comparisons or musings were lost on me. I felt at times that the book was more about his love of Greece than the current adventure in Sicily. However, there was some interesting observations of places, along with a loosely strung travel group. I did note several places of interest for a planned trip to Sicily.

[Caroline Duggan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Addictive and memorable. The way Durrell moves between observation, reflection and deep thinking about something puzzling, or a memory that surfaces. I prefer this and 'Bitter Lemons' to 'Justine'. The sense of place is equally hypnotic and compelling in Justine, but Durrell here is better company than his characters in that novel. In this semi-fiction, the voice of Martine is really powerful. Durrell's grief for his friend is a constant in the novel but it is the layering of Martine's memories, and her urge to share her experiences with him in her letters, that is a wonderful counterpoint to the novel's main narrative.

[Kerry Shoji · Rating 1 out of 5]

Do real people talk like this? I knew this book was not a true guidebook of Sicily at the outset, but written as seen through the eyes of the author. I was hoping it would be similar to John Keahy's Sicilian Splendor. I was unprepared for the effete snobbery of his opinions. So boooooring.

I could not finish reading it, although I gave it a try-- read 100 painful pages before ditching it.

[Bill · Rating 4 out of 5]

An erudite islomane odyssey replete with poetic excursi. There were deft touches of humor, a true picture painted of the terroir and the people, despite the line between reality and fiction being unclear. It was my first book by this author which makes me curious to try more. I shan’t list them all below, however as a logophile I was delighted to find not one, not two, but 22 new words.

[Ethan Fanshel · Rating 5 out of 5]

I read this book after visiting Sicily 5 times in the 1970’s. I love this book-there is a certain type of Englishman who really understands the Mediterranean, both ancient and modern. I would venture a guess that those who don’t like this book haven’t spent much time in Sicily.

[Zuvielekatzen · Rating 4 out of 5]

Interesting story. I missed the part at the beginning where he said that all the characters were made up. Interesting traveloge. I enjoyed the book and enjoyed his writing. I still like his brother Gerry's works better...

[Maria R · Rating 3 out of 5]

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[Stephen Hull · Rating 2 out of 5]

A very minor work by Durrell, which I only read because I was going on holiday to Sicily. Not unpleasant and peppered with a few nuggets of interesting information but that’s about it.

[Bill Perrin · Rating 2 out of 5]

Painful read. More about what a wordsmith Mr Durrell is (and an altogether clever chap) than Sicily or for that matter anything else.

[Anthony Peter · Rating 3 out of 5]

Not, I felt, one of Durrell’s best books about Mediterranean Islands, but don’t let that put you off. There are the qualities you expect from him – brilliantly sympathetic descriptions – evocations, really - of landscapes and places, a focus on friends and travelling companions, a rich appreciation of the vividness of living and an eye and an ear for the comic.

The chief drawback for me was Durrell’s inclusion of extended passages in which he reflects on his relationship with a friend called Martine whom he had known well in Cyprus and Egypt and who had eventually settled on and died in Sicily. It is her death that prompts him to feel a pang of remorse that he never responded to her urging him to visit her and to see Sicily, and this pang leads to a certain degree of what was for me rather dull quasi-philosophising.

Nevertheless, just as in ‘Prospero’s Cell’, ‘Reflections on a Marine Venus’ and ‘Bitter Lemons’, it is not simply the superlative accounts of landscape, architecture, and history that attract the reader but Durrell’s deep love of studying other people and of making friends. The characters that remain particularly in mind from this account are several.

To start with there is Deeds, a former serviceman (Desert Rat, in fact) enjoying a bit of a ‘swan’ at the expense of the Allied [War]Graves Commission, but who is also on something of a post-war pilgrimage to a cemetery where a friend killed in the conflict is buried; but he is a cultivated man and he and Durrell strike up an easy friendship that is warm and mutually interesting. There is also ‘an egregious fellow called Beddoes’ who says he has “Just been hurled out of a prep school near Dungeness for behaviour unbecoming to an officer and a hypocrite.” He emerges as a kind of chancer, a ducker and dodger, charming, unreliable, something of a performer and always slightly looking over his shoulder. And he provides Durrell with an anecdote that makes for a bizarrely amusing ending to his travelogue.

Roberto, the tour leader, is ‘of a noble but penniless family and had been a university lecturer in history’. His nature, however, rebelled against academic intriguing, and he prefers being a ‘guide, philosopher and friend’ to travellers in Sicily and Durrell notes that ‘his calm friendliness had an immediately reassuring effect’ on the tourists in his charge. Roberto’s companion on the bus is the driver, Mario, ‘a stocky and severe-looking young man, who might have been a prizefighter or a fisherman from his dark scowling countenance’, but whose skills as a driver of a bus in narrow streets and on perilous roads Durrell admires immensely.

And then there is the relatively minor figure of ‘Miss Lobb of London’ who is accorded one or two moments that highlight her as a spirited Englishwoman abroad, and loving it. And the other travellers are given their moments as well.

So: my reservations aside, ‘Sicilian Carousel’ will remain on my shelves and will be revisited for what I loved about it. Apart from anything else, it is full of sunshine and the stillness of an ancient, classical, Mediterranean landscape, one that I both imagine and recall from limited but formative experiences in Turkey in the mid-1960s and later holidays in Crete and Greece.

[Michael · Rating 5 out of 5]

I approached this one expecting a windy literary tome; I'm not a big fan of the dense "Alexandria Quartet." But this is a wonderful and very funny travelogue about a reluctant excursion on a Sicilian bus tour, with every character drawn with a sharp pencil point. It only gets better when Durrell smudges fact and fiction.

[l · Rating 2 out of 5]

I like his style and there are certain passages, certain turns of phrase which are lovely but it is not a particularly compelling travelogue. A good reminder to myself to read more of his works though.

[Phyl · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a 35 year old book about a tour through Sicily. He is such a good writer that he sparks your interest in the history of the island and the people who accompanied him on the tour.

[Elaine · Rating 3 out of 5]

Sipping Snippets of Sicily

A look back at the island from a somewhat archaic view. A very interesting slice of tourist life around Sicily.

[Carmen · Rating 3 out of 5]

Drags a bit. He writes about a bus trip he took in Sicily. So it's a mixture of what we saw and whom he was with.