Prospero's Cell: A Guide to the Landscape and Manners of the Island of Corcyra

Rating:
Summary: A poet as a tourist guide?
Review: The English writer Lawrence Durrell spent four years on the island of Corfu together with his first wife Nancy Myers in the years 1935-1939. He has collected his memoirs on this period during his staying in Alexandria during the WWII.

Prospero's Cell evades genre classification. It is an autobiography, but not a particularly factual one - for instance, along with Lawrence and Nancy, the whole Durrell family - his mother, two brothers and sister - came to live on Corfu for the same period, a fact he only acknowledges in a passing remark or two. It is written in a form of a diary, but the story flows without paying any attention on the interpunctuating dates. It claims to be a guide to the landscape and manners of the island of Corfu, but is useless as such. It spends a considerable time discussing the history and myths concerning Corfu, but the material is not laid out in a systematic and scholarly manner, and is probably of low value as a historical text.

Apart from ephemeral characters, the four personae make out the main cast: apart from Lawrence and his wife, there is also a doctor, biologist and polymath, Dr. Theodore Stephanides, and a bohemian Armenian journalist, Ivan Zarian. (Both are actual persons, of course; apart from here, Stephanides also appears on Gerald Durrell's My Family and Other Animals, and Henry Miller's The Colossus of Maroussi.) However, Durrell has taken the liberty to interrupt occasionally this chronicle of their living, their thoughts etc. with a treatise on the Saint Spiridon, the island patron; or Karaghiosis, the puppet theatre hero; or a long treatise on the island history and myths concerning it. Prospero's cell ends with "some peasant remedies in common use against disease", a "synoptic history of the island of Corfu", lists of places to see, things to visit etc., and finally concludes with an anthology of letters written by Edward Lear, an English painter who spent on Corfu several years in mid-19th century.

Durrel's language is like brocade: rich, heavy and very sophisticated. He is too serene and spiritual to talk humour, even when the topic is indeed funny, e.g. the accident with the Corfu fire brigade, the Zarian's obsession with "Mantinea 1936" and the Stephanides' confusion with the brain cutlets, he merely cites the narrator. Still, it is a nice holiday reading, an intellectual supplement to any *real* guide to Corfu you happen to take with you. And, while you are there, don't forget to get yourself Hilary Whitton Paipeti's guide, In the Footsteps of Lawrence Durrell and Gerald Durrell in Corfu (1935-39), which will help you connect the world of Durrells with the contemporary Corfu.

Rating:
Summary: Corfu as I wish it still was (or were)
Review: This is a memoir about Durrell's stay of several years on the Island of Corfu and about the delightfully intelligent and profoundly cultured bevy of lunatics who make up his circle of friends. There is an Armenian jounalist, a studious doctor, a member of the nobility of dubious origins. There are marvelous land- and seascapes, peasants, servants, drivers and fishermen. While the author maintains the kind of distance from his material needed for writing, he also shows the love he feels for all these people and for this island. He makes us curse our fate for not being present at the conversations he has with his friends, which are full of historical and literary references and novel interpretations of texts and events, not in the form of rarefied abstractions but all connected quite concretely to the island and its fascinating people. There is also light banter and refined teasing. The doctor comes into possession of a brain from a cadaver that he intends to use for scientific purposes but by accident it gets served to his guests for lunch. The Armenian discovers a Greek wine he finds exquisite (he has heretofore hated Greek wines) and buys 85 bottles of it, only to find that 84 are actually quite inferior, more like high class vinegar. Durrell describes many of the customs and attitudes of the local people and makes them seem a lot more honest and human than one would suppose. He treats us to a performance of the well-known Karaghiosis puppet theatre and describes the (mostly crude) reactions of some of the town luminaries. The show is ostensibly for children but the adults enjoy it as well, perhaps even more since they can appreciate all the thinly veiled political and religious references. There is a detailed description of the grape harvest with a subtly drawn Christ-figure clad only in a white shirt who treads the grapes with his arms outstretched as the red liquid oozes out from the bottom of the vat. This probably symbolizes the bloody crucifixion Greece would undergo in a not so remote future. Durrell describes a paradise but war is coming and soon all these friends will be evacuated to Alexandria, where the book's final words are written. It was very beautiful while it lasted and reading about it still gives pleasure.

Rating:
Summary: discovering the Mediterranean
Review: William Durrell's investigation of modern love in THE ALEXANDRIA QUARTET announced the author's interest in blending geography and metaphysics, which probably originates in his Indian heritage.

The Corfu that the British author knew in 1936-7 might have disappeared already, yet his romantic portrayal of Mediterranean culture captures the spirit that despite inevitable historic changes and the ravashes of modernisation still prevails on the coasts of this historic sea. The bittersweet mixture of melancholy and happiness that is at the soul of everything Mediterranean, and even his philosophical reflections are impregnated with the soft sensualism in which the Mediterranean tradition of tolerance and antiquity is embodied.

PROSPERO'S CELL was published in 1945, four years after the author had left the island, and thus the nostalgia that pervades his writing further contributes to the beauty of this book. Some narrative chapters seem far-fetched in their anglicising romanticism, like the moonlight discussions on "Greekness" with the rich and bohemian Count D., but still Durrell's passionate portrayal of Greece should help enliven some rainy winter afternoons.