The Alexandria Quartet

I read Durrell's collection when I was in my mid-twenties and was ravished. Today I am less naive, less satisfied by the lazy repetitions, the obsessive obsessing. Still, the achievement, the singularly narcissistic—in its way, far more narcissistic than the unreadable diaries of Nin—quartet, with its mirrors, its scrapbook approach to novelizing, is impossible to dismiss. It is one of the last great acts of Orientalism.