Lawrence Durrell : Between Love and Death, East and West, Sex and Metaphysics

A critical survey of the novelist who died in 1990. The author studies in detail all of Durrell's work; the late series of novels The Avignon Quintet, the Tunc and Nunquam novels, the travel books, the Antrobus diplomatic sketches, the letters, the poetry, and the books that made Durrell's name in the late 1950s, The Alexandria Quartet. Robinson discusses Durrell's creative friendships with Henry Miller especially, and also Anais Nin, Richard Aldington and others. The inter-related themes of love, art and death form the core of all Durrell's work. Durrell emerges as a major writer, who developed the literary modernism of Proust, Eliot and Joyce and fused it with Oriental philosophy. Still critically neglected, this study offers a much-needed new appraisal of Durrell.