James Tait Black Memorial Prizes
Monsieur (FF Classics)
A layered novel set in Avignon, revolving around love, memory, and lost relationships.
作品情報
A love triangle and a city’s memory intertwine in a dreamlike web.
Lawrence Durrell’s Monsieur traces a maze of memory and desire through the city of Avignon and the relationships of three central characters. As the first volume of the Avignon Quintet, it opens the sequence’s larger design.
書籍情報
- 出版社
- Faber & Faber
- 発売日
- 2001-04-09
- ページ数
- 304ページ
- 言語
- 英語
- サイズ
- 11.4 x 2.2 x 17.9 cm
- ISBN-13
- 9780571209743
- ISBN-10
- 0571209742
- 価格
- 4518 JPY
- カテゴリ
- 洋書/Literature & Fiction/Literary
Lawrence Durrell's classic novel Monsieur is set in a dilapidated chateau near Avignon and focuses on a group of characters who have decided to remove themselves from the world. Egypt, France and Venice provide a background for the action, which offers an original interpretation of the so-called sins of the Templars as Durrell depicts his characters caught up in the sinister and mysterious doings of a gnostic suicide club. 'Monsieur contains some of the finest descriptive set-pieces even Durrell has ever written. I would not wish to have missed these evocations of Avignon: of a winter horse-ride through the Provençal countryside; of Christmas in a chateau crumbling into magnificent decay; of a slow dreamlike journey through the Nile.' Susan Hill, The Times
Lawrence Durrell was a British novelist, poet, dramatist, and travel writer. Born in 1912 in India to British colonial parents, he was sent to school in England and later moved to Corfu with his family - a period which his brother Gerald fictionalised in My Family and Other Animals - later filmed as The Durrells in Corfu - and which he himself described in Prospero's Cell . The first of Durrell's island books, this was followed by Reflections on a Marine Venus on Rhodes; Bitter Lemons , on Cyprus, which won the Duff Cooper Memorial Prize; and, later, The Greek Islands . Durrell's first major novel, The Black Book , was published in 1938 in Paris, where he befriended Henry Miller and Anaïs Nin - and it was praised by T. S. Eliot, who published his poetry in 1943. A wartime sojourn in Egypt inspired his bestselling masterpiece, The Alexandria Quartet ( Justine, Balthazar, Mountolive and Clea ) which he completed in his new home in Southern France, where in 1974 he began The Avignon Quintet . When he died in 1990, Durrell was one of the most celebrated writers in British history.
レビュー
-
Dark and disturbing.
-
I gave it one star because that is the step to arrive at the review section. Do not waste your time. It is dated in every aspect. If you need a Durrell jolt retread "The Alexandria Quartet."
-
I loved Durrell's writing when I was in college. I picked this up on a whim and found that his prose was simply too overheated and purple for me now. Best left to the young.
-
Not recommended for everyone. I have read and re-read the Alexandria Quartet but had never read the Avignon stories. I have read just this one so far -- it is kind of hard to keep straight who is "talking" so I kept going back and forth. I may get up enough stamina to read the rest of the series.
-
Didn't care for it. Overwritten, precious, uninvolving. Sometimes being stylish doesn't cut it.