Alexandria: City Of Memory

Rating:
Summary: Durrell, Forster and Cavafy
Review: I have read this fascinating book and cannot do better than to offer this review which appeared on January 4th 2005 in The Times Literary Supplement:

'Michael Haag's dazzling new book, Alexandria: City of memory, has two aims, both admirably achieved: to construct a political and social history covering a half century or so - roughly 1915 to 1960 - within the larger period of what he calls "the heyday of cosmopolitan Alexandria"; and to display the resulting version of this cosmopolitan Alexandria to us through the lives and works of some of those who have left written or verbal records. ...

'The written record used by Haag includes Cavafy, of course, as well as E. M. Forster and Lawrence Durrell, all three of whom not only wrote extensively about their Alexandrian experience, but also participated in significant social networks. It might be supposed that this ground has been adequately covered by the multitude of specialized studies that already exist on the individual authors, or by Jane Lagoudis Pinchin's excellent literary study Alexandria Still: Forster, Durrell, and Cavafy (1977). However, much of Haag's material, even when he deals with such major figures, is new, has never been published before, and is thus anecdotal in the original sense of the word. ...

'Haag is at his most brilliant when he deals with Lawrence Durrell, on whom he is now perhaps the world's leading expert. Durrell's reputation rests almost entirely on the Alexandria Quartet (1962), which arose from his experience in Alexandria during the Second World War. Neither of the two full-length biographies of him, however, is in any way adequate to this subject. On one level, Haag's treatment of Alexandria itself during the war provides a parallel to that of Cairo by Artemis Cooper in her splendid Cairo in the War (1989); on another, it answers several questions specifically raised by the Quartet and explains what lay behind its genesis better than anyone else has yet done. The personality of Eve Cohen, the first of Durrell's two beautiful Alexandrian Jewish wives and the obvious inspiration for Justine, is crucial here; and Haag not only interviewed her extensively, but travelled with her back to Alexandria to revisit the sites that figured in her life during the War.'