Theodora Elucubrare

I recently read Lawrence Durrell's Alexandria Quartet, mainly because George Steiner really liked it. And I really didn't. Or rather, I didn't really. I don't know why; the prose was actually quite lovely, which is very important, and there was a plot. It bothers me quite a bit that I don't know why I dislike it. I usually know - in fact, I usually dissect it here. While it is "allowed" to dislike something simply because you don't like it, it rarely happens to me. For example: things I dislike: Puccini, because his music tends to be pretty but not particularly memorable, or even different; Stephen Saylor, because his characters are unbelievable for their time; Vergil, because I find him to be lacking in poetic spirit*.

So since I finished the Durrell, I've been trying to put my finger on what exactly made it hard to get into. Perhaps the distance - the narration is a certain type of lyrical that reads as detached; but there's also a lack of distance on the narrator's part, perhaps related to the small scope (the novels are about a set of about six ex-pats, of various patriae, in Alexandria). Maybe the novels are better read with more time between them; I had an omnibus edition. Serial books tend to be better spaced out. Or maybe I just don't really care about the lovelives, no matter how dramatic, of other people, especially rather self-involved people. This self-involvement contributes to the lack of distance, I think; the narrator takes himself very seriously, and while there are some portions of the text that conflict with this self-presentation, Durrell is very much of the narrator's party.

Even after all that, I still don't know what exactly bothers me - and that bothers me greatly.


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*OH YEAH I WENT THERE