Customer Reviews

The Black Book

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Lawrence Durrell had two novels to his credit ('Pied Piper of Lovers' and 'Panic Spring') when T.S. Eliot, Durrell's editor at Faber & Faber, said that 'The Black Book' was 'the first piece of work by a new English writer to give me any hope for the future of prose fiction'. In a complex tale set in a seedy London hotel, Durrell spun a narrative which was to foreshadow his best-known work of two decades later, the Alexandria Quartet in its dealings with time, characterisation, and narrative. Memorable characters and rich prose swirl around the central figure of Lawrence Lucifer. Considered unpublishable in 1937, it did not find its way into print in Britain until 1961. Well worth the time if you find a copy.

This was Durrell's first major novel, & anticipates many of the ideas which would dominate his later works. While the book is slightly derivative in regard to Henry Miller's 'Tropic of Cancer', it goes far beyond Miller's idea of the Western death-consciousness, and is wonderfully inventive and energetic. As a response to James Joyce, it is a portrait of the artist as an ANGRY young man. Well worth the time and cost.

This is a magnificent book. The legend around it is that Durrell sent the manuscript for this to Henry Miller, in Paris, and asked that he read it and then toss it in the Seine... Miller read it, and obviously did not cast it away, instead helped to have it published... TS Eliot was one of the guys responsible for getting this out. So goes the name dropping...

Now, I'm not a fan of Miller's works. Sue me, the guy just doesn't appeal to my sensibilities... And most of Lawrence Durrell's later novels don't do much for me either- I'm not sure what it is, I feel like the power of The Black Book, all its vigor and spleen, all that lyrical spite became diminished, somehow. I love the language of this book. The fisrt couple pages- I can read them over and over. I've read them to my little brother, my mother, several girlfriends...

All values are personal in their manifestation- as I said, I have read parts of this (my favorite parts) to people before and they were not as moved as I was. So I'm not claiming this to be the key text that will unlock 20th C. literature for you (look to Celine for that!). It's just highly reccommended to you as an angry denunciation of a world long gone. The author is trapped in his values, his place, his class and he wants to burn it all away, tear it all down- all the emptiness, the lack of connection, the bald hypocrisy and the babbling of the masses. The lies and the desolate souls around him that murmur... But he can't help loving the world he loathes, the beauty and transience of it... and can't help but loathe himself for loving it... I'm rambling... And I haven't said a thing about plot or characters... So be it.

If you are a fan of Isaac Babel, Platonov, John Kennedy Toole, Charles Portis, TS Eliot, Sartre, Henry Miller, Wallace Stevens, John Fowles, Calvino, Tibor Fischer, Unamuno, Burroughs... There's some slice of similarity in all those writers...

In 1938 TS Eliot praised The Black Book as being "the first piece of work by a new English writer to give me any hope for the future of prose fiction." This title is indispensable to a full understanding of the Alexandrian Quartet's mastermind. Written at a time when still a young iconoclast, inebriated with sex, sin, youth and the vagaries of transgression, we find in this strange impassioned frenzied look into the indiscretions of the 30s a vulgar voice that shares a pristine magnificence of prose as we were to later become enchanted by in the Quartet.
The sensuality of this novel is frustrated by a sense of idealism which informs the self-seeking, relentless, unguarded characters that hunt and haunt the moldering Regina Hotel in London, creating nothing less than the crucible of lust.
In the intro Durell specifies that "this novel has a special importance. I can't help being attached to it because in writing it I first heard the sound of my own voice."
As if it were not enough the book was to suffer censorship and while deemed unpublishable by the English Press it proves to be a telling document of an era, a genius and a literary void being filled by way of an explosive talet that, although it overburdens beauty on ocassion, it reveals the impetus of a moral infatuation, indelibly voracious and indiscriminating.
Outrageous self-indulgence preluding aesthetic wisdom. Take a day off work and read it in one sitting. You'll be the better thanks to it.

If you made your way through Alexandria Quartet and marveled at the dueling dual achievements of writer and reader, don't miss The Black Book. Some things in Durrell are very trying ("... to try and ..."; too many things are 'mauve') but almost every paragraph contains a unique insight.