Michael’s Reviews > The Avignon Quintet: Monsieur / Livia / Constance / Sebastian / Quinx > Status Update

‘[…] As for the gipsies, they have made no effort to capitalise on the tragedy of their extermination in the camps as the Jews have done. A total silence is all that has emerged – not a poem, not a song, not a scrap of protest folklore! It's uncanny.’

‘For us gipsies both Hitler and Stalin were children of the Old Testament executing a blood programme inspired by Moloch. There is nothing to be done to hasten its inevitable disappearance and its transformation into something new, thank goodness! People fall into these thought moulds from copying each other. But we can with justice accuse Christianity of masterminding our intellectual disarray. […]

‘As for the book it was a hopeless task, for what is to be done with characters who are all the time trying to exchange selves, turn into each other? And then, ascribing a meaning to point-events? There is no meaning and we falsify the truth about reality in adding one. The universe is playing, the universe is only improvising!

‘I did not want to fuck her at first, I did not dare to want to because there was so much as yet unrehearsed between us. […] “From the first look we exchanged in the slip at Lyons as we set off down the Rhône. But alas!” […] Whoever loved that loved not at first sight?’

‘And like lovers at any time and everywhere they suddenly found the need for privacy overwhelming; so much so that for several weeks after this critical re-evaluation of their loving they almost went out of circulation as far as their friends were concerned—preferring to dine early and lock up at an early bedtime rather than dawdling over dinner […]’

Constance analysed every man she has been with. She analysed Sam, frustrated at his lack of communication during the war (he wrote about trifling affairs). Affad she could never analyse, for he didn't fall nearly into a category of thought. Sylvie was mad, and her position as her doctor allowed her to analyse her while being intimate. Finally she and Blanford discuss being together; the analysis is over.

And here it's as if Durrell is exposing his writing method: Toby and Sutcliffe might be considered halves of one another—as they were Gog and Magog in the first book. But, Blanford says of his ‘figment of my fancy’, ‘[s]omehow you have managed to hold your separateness, your own identity… do I mean that?’

The blending of characters is conscious, deliberate: ‘The old stable outlines of the dear old linear novel have been sidestepped in favour of soft focus palimpsest which enables the actors to turn into each other, to melt into each other's inner lifespace if they wish.’

Here Blanford conflates Affad with Akkad: ‘[…] part of the notes which I scattered out of the train window were notes I had borrowed with permission from Affad – the little sermons he pronounced at Macabru in the desert.’

‘Reality has several dialects, and the most powerful are sexual ones.’