"Bitter Lemons of Cyprus" is both an evocative and memorable picture of village life and a social and historical document of a lost community. Written during the gradual uprising of the Greek Cypriots who wanted union with Greece (Enosis), Durrell observes the people's struggles on an intimate and personal level. Sadly some fifty years later the Cypriots situation remains unresolved. As Scotsman reviewer Betty Tadman notes; "It's hard to imagine Turks and Greeks ever coexisting again as they did when Durrell lived among them."
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29 of 29 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Memories of times lost,
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This review is from: Bitter Lemons of Cyprus (Mass Market Paperback)
An evocative memoir of the author's stay [1953-6] in what's now Northern Cyprus. Much of the landscape was still as he described it when we visited Belle Pais, Famagusta, Kyrenia, and Nicosia, the Tree of Idleness and other sites on our hiking trip to Cyprus in 2001. His adventures in buying and maintaining a house rival those of Peter Mayle's "A Year in Provence"written many years later. The peaceful interludes in the hills are marred by foreshadowing of the political turmoil and tragedies that would engulf Cyprus in the following decades, leading to the departure of Durrell and other foreign nationals. Some of those towns and even cities remain ghost towns to this day. Once hard to find, this book has now been deservedly reissued.
12 of 12 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
utter loveliness.,
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This review is from: Bitter Lemons of Cyprus (Mass Market Paperback)
I wouldn't want to spoil the thing by saying too much, but it was a very interesting read, aside from being intensely pleasant. There's a certain delicacy, about death, and strife, and the drinking of wine. Durrell is well spoken and well informed: you might think, like I did, that the story of Cyprus isn't politically relevant. But I only thought that because I'm an ignorant American, and because I had yet to read this lovely book.
4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A PORTRAIT OF OLD CYPRUS,
By Robert Egby "Author of The Quest of the Radic... (Chaumont, upstate New York.) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)
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This review is from: Bitter Lemons of Cyprus (Mass Market Paperback)
Lawrence (Larry) Durrell was Public Relations Officer for the British Government on the island colony of Cyprus. As a reporter I knew him well. In Bitter Lemons Larry narrates his personal observations of a way of life rapidly disappearing, the Colonial Empire. Colorful cottages, crusader castles, Byzantine abbeys, picnics with ouzo and commanderia under the olive trees, and the characters -- British, Greek and Turkish Cypriots with their sometimes lovable, sometimes negative peculiarities, but very human idiosyncracies. Larry records a wonderful tapestry of human life in a colony that died in August 1960. Bitter Lemons: A work of literary art by a craftsman in love with Aphrodite's isle.
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