Sicilian Carousel

Rating:
Summary: Durrell Lite
Review: I think of this book as 'Durrell Lite'. While Durrell's language is as magisterial and richly evocative as always, reading his account of a package tour of Sicily is a bit like going to hear Pavarotti sing in a small high school auditorium with poor lighting. There just isn't enough scope for his vast powers of observation within the confines of this brief, hurried tour. Instead of colorful locals, for example, Durrell gives us cranky, mostly English tourists, inconveniently falling ill in cramped hotels. If only he had gone to Sicily on his own, to spend a summer or a year, what a different book this might have been!

Rating:
Summary: A quick tour disguised as a novel or vice versa
Review: In his 1977 account of a bus tour of Sicily, Sicilian Carousel, Lawrence Durrell says "all the characters in this volume are imaginary." In some sense it is a novel about Martine, a friend on Cyprus who lived in Sicily and often urged the narrator to visit Sicily. The narrator is guided by and confirms many of her analyses of places and histories and also portrays an international cast of fellow travelers (a French couple with a child, a Japanese couple, and various English types). What the narrator and Martine write is mostly perspicacious both about Sicily and about traveling. Reading the book is like joining the conversation between Martine and the narrator about Sicily and seems a better book to read after one has some experience of the island to compare to the impressions of the now-dead Durrell and the long-dead Martine.

(The occasional poems are underwhelming, though I like the line "They also die who only sit and wait.")