Customer Reviews

Sicilian Carousel

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I think of this book as 'Durrell Lite'. While Durrell's language is as magisterial and richly evocative as always, reading his account of a package tour of Sicily is a bit like going to hear Pavarotti sing in a small high school auditorium with poor lighting. There just isn't enough scope for his vast powers of observation within the confines of this brief, hurried tour. Instead of colorful locals, for example, Durrell gives us cranky, mostly English tourists, inconveniently falling ill in cramped hotels. If only he had gone to Sicily on his own, to spend a summer or a year, what a different book this might have been!

I got this book in preparation for a similar bus tour I was scheduled to take around Sicily. But while Durrell always promised himself he would write a "pocket guide" to Sicily - this isn't it. This book is about almost everything but Sicily.

Oh, it gives some of the atmospherics of the Island. And it conveys a sense of how profoundly Greek the Island is. But beyond that, there isn't much of the modern Sicily here. And there is almost nothing about the place that Durrell cites as having personally attracted him, almost nothing that he recommends to those with a similar temperament. He carried away few unique insights from his junket.

Most of this book is a reminiscence about Durrell's friendship with a deceased woman named "Martine" - and about their days together on other islands, mostly Cyprus. There is a lot of somewhat abstruse reference to Greek mythology, a lot of showy erudition here. But again, where is the living Sicily in all this?

It is interesting to read Durrell's account of his friendship. Although it took place just a few decades ago, it almost seems as if it must have taken place in another time altogether, on another planet. Rarely does a man so take to heart a woman's character and ideas. Rarely does a man quote a woman, as Durrell quotes Martine here - re-reading her letters to him, recalling her every turn of phrase, her interests. So the book is worthwhile on that account, because of the way it holds out hope for real intellectual friendship between a man and a woman.

But I repeat one more time - where is Sicily? If like me, you are looking for a personal guide to that Island, you might do better to just stick with Rick Steves.

In his 1977 account of a bus tour of Sicily, Sicilian Carousel, Lawrence Durrell says "all the characters in this volume are imaginary." In some sense it is a novel about Martine, a friend on Cyprus who lived in Sicily and often urged the narrator to visit Sicily. The narrator is guided by and confirms many of her analyses of places and histories and also portrays an international cast of fellow travelers (a French couple with a child, a Japanese couple, and various English types). What the narrator and Martine write is mostly perspicacious both about Sicily and about traveling. Reading the book is like joining the conversation between Martine and the narrator about Sicily and seems a better book to read after one has some experience of the island to compare to the impressions of the now-dead Durrell and the long-dead Martine.

(The occasional poems are underwhelming, though I like the line "They also die who only sit and wait.")

"Sicilian Carousel" (1976) is the fourth and final 'landscape book' that Durrell wrote about his travels in and around the Mediterranean. The other books in this series are "Prospero's Cell," "Reflections on a Marine Venus," and "Bitter Lemons." This volume was published almost two decades after "Bitter Lemons" and Durrell is a much more mellow writer--perhaps because of his retirement from various posts within the British Foreign Office. Or perhaps because no one was shooting at him on Sicily.

Martine, who was a friend of Durrell's on Cyprus ("Bitter Lemons") is a ghostly presence on Sicily, the largest and perhaps the most beautiful of the Mediterranean islands. She had tried to persuade her friend to visit her in life. Instead, he brings her letters to Sicily and shares Martine's favorite places with her in death. He compares her "to a sea-bird who has floated out of sight" and spends the book trying to lay her ghost.

I would not have expected this author to sign up for a packaged tour. In fact, he states: "I had begun to think that my decision to join the Carousel [tour group] was utterly mad. I shall loathe the group, I feel it. I was not made for group travel." But here he is chasing his ghost around Sicily in a little red bus with an eccentric, multinational bunch of tourists, including a British prep-school master accused of pederasty.

I suppose there's always someone like Beddoes in every tour group--someone who loves jokes about flatulence, has lousy table manners, and pries unashamedly into his fellow-travelers' lives. "Later of course we were to ask God plaintively in our prayers what we had done to merit such a traveling companion."

Durrell finally reconciles himself to Beddoes, even loans him money and scatters his clothes about the crater of Mount Etna when Beddoes decides to fake a suicide and change his identity.

At the end of the tour, the author bumps into an old friend of Martine's in Taormina, and together they listen to a tape of her at a party. It's not so much that Durrell was mourning Martine as it was that he felt she had eluded him. Now, at journey's end, he can finally reconcile himself with her ghost. "I had, in a manner of speaking, recovered contact with Martine. It was reassuring to feel that she was, in a sense, still there, still bright in the memory of her friends."

Indeed, as Durrel in these island books is still bright in the memory of his readers.

For those like myself who know Durrell mainly through reading the 'Alexandria Quartet' this work will be a surprise. All the complex ambiguities the poetic language and the endless confusing of identities which inform the 'Quartet' are absent here. Instead we have fine, precise, workable prose, careful descriptions of landscape, and character. Durrell here takes a 'group tour' with an odd- band of multinationals who at first show slight repugnance towards each other, but who end up , if not in deep lasting friendship, but in pleasurable acquaintance. But the major character of the work aside from Durrell is a former friend of his who he knew in Crete many years ago. Her thoughts and observations comprise a good share of what is on Durrell's mind. Nonetheless his historical sense of Sicily, his ability to perceive at different times and through different visistor's eyes are a principal pleasure of the book. Also Durrell's love of the Mediterranean and his real feeling for the culture in its various aspects. His sense of the beauty of its nature is strong, and his writing on the flora especially nice. There is a mildness in the whole adventure. It is not a bold exploration to a distant unknown land, but rather a childlike spin around an often - visited place.
Durrell's great intelligence and his feeling for the little foible which makes each character special inform this work, and make a truly pleasurable read.
Just for the feel and the fun here is a sample of Durrell's writing, this on the great Mediterranean tree, the olive.
"The hardiness of the tree is proverbial, it seems to live without water, though it responds readily to moisture and to fertiliser when available. But it will stand heat to an astonishing degee and keep the beauty of its grey- silver leaf. The root of the tree is a huge grenade- its proportions astonish those who see dead trees being extracted like huge molars. Quite small specimens have roots the size of pianos.Then the trimmings make excellent kindling and the wood burns so swiftly and so ardently that bakers like to start up their ovens with it. It has other virtues also; it can be worked and has a beautiful grain when carved and oiled. Of the fruit it is useless to speak unless it be to extol its properties, and the Greek poets have not faulted the job. It's a thrifty tree and a hardy one. It has a delicate moment during the brief flowering period when a sudden turn of wind or snow can prejudice the blossom and thus the fruit. But it is a tree which grows on you when you live with it, and when the north wind turns it inside out- from grey green to silver - one can imagine with accuracy the exact shade of Athena's smiling eyes."

It is prose passages like this and perhaps less the examples of Durrell's own poetry which he includes in the volume which do give a sense of what a strong poetic writer Durrell can be, when at his best.

Lawrence Durrell's novels interest me not at all. But his travel writing is deeply satisfying, compelling and achieves a profundity that is rare in any form of literature.

"What was the Mediterranean tapestry all about anyway; particularly when it came to extending the frame of reference in the direction of art, architecture, literature? Italy, Spain, Greece, the Midi of France -- They all had the same light and the same garden produce. They were all garlic countries, underprivileged in everything but the bounteous sense of spareness and beauty."

Here is Sicily, an ancient, famous and fabled isle with a rich and fascinating history to rival any patch of earth on the globe. Did you know that after the Arabs in 965 came the Normans in 1068. Here is the cathedral at Palermo: "It was as if we had turned a page in the story-book which was Sicilian history and emerged into a period which echoed the most unusual juxtaposition of styles imaginable. This pure Palermo Sicilian is an extraordinary thing, the most beautifully realized merging of the grave and lofty Norman shapes with riotous and intricate Byzantine and Moorish decorative motifs, a brilliant syncopation of the grave central theme. It was my first taste of Sicilian baroque-Moorish -- I think there is no established designation for this weird Gaudi-Arabian-Gothic. But it comes off in a magnificently innocent and playful way."

Throwing himself at the mercy of a bus tour, 'The Sicilian Carousel', Durrell introduces a cast of passengers that rivals Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, the prim, but enticing Miss Dobbs, barmaid of London, the phlegmatic French couple, always out of humor, and several more, who betray themselves in every word and action. He takes you everywhere from Syracuse to Agrigento, to Chaos, the birthplace of Pirandello, and there is Segesta: "It did not need the learned dissertations of guide books to tell one about the spelndour of this particular temple, standing there so quietly in the vale, wise as an elephant bearing the world on its back. What was missing was the context simply, the vanished town which would have put everything in its place and reduced the sense of strangeness and alienation which I must say I personally found exciting and stimulating. But the feeling of deep composure and calm was conveyed not only by the temple and theater but by the whole site."

How refreshing it is to read an interesting man's candid observations from the days before the constraints of self-conscious political correctness had buried all the zest and exuberance of living and talking and made us all careful and judgmental.

What entices and delights me most about this book, is not only his fresh and evocative language, his observations and historical anecdotes, the amusing incidents of his companions, but Durrell's courage and honesty. He allows himself to be nothing more or less than a sophisticated, educated tourist, encountering a densely historical island, whose long, violent, creative, inspiring, sometimes comical, sometimes tragic history, is enlightening, reassuring, depressing and ultimately says much about the journey we all make through this strange and foreign land called life.