Call number
FIC DUR
Collection
Genres
Series
Publication
The Viking Press (1975), Edition: 1st, 305 pages
Description
From the olive trees of the south of France to Gnostic cults of Egypt, Bruce Drexel and his lovers are invented and reinvented by forces at the edge of their comprehension in the first volume of the Avignon Quintet For British doctor Bruce Drexel, a return to Provence is bittersweet. Here, at a rustic chateau, he once fell in love with Sylvie, the Frenchwoman who would become his wife, and befriended her brother, Piers. The three made up a peculiar, potent m�nage for years until Sylvie's descent into madness and Piers's suicide. As Drexel attends to Piers's affairs, he becomes steeped in the memories of a spiritually transformational trip to Egypt; the band of intellectual confederates who used to be his intimate friends; and a three-sided love that became his reason for being. So begins Monsieur, the masterful first entry of Durrell's Avignon Quintet, an infinite regress of memory and imagination that challenges the formal conventions of fiction.… (more)
Subjects
User reviews
LibraryThing member Ganeshaka
Remember P.T. Barnum's joke "The Egress"? That impresario of curiosities once hung a sign "This way to the Egress!" inside his exhibition hall. A white-gloved hand pointed to a door. Rubes, the hasty, and those with limited vocabularies, found themselves in an alley, needing a ticket to get back
An introduction to Durrell's Monsieur: or The Prince of Darkness should begin in a similar spirit with a sign "This way to the Quincunx!"
A sign which includes a caution from Coleridge's Xanadu:
“And all should cry, Beware! Beware!
His flashing eyes, his floating hair!
Weave a circle round him thrice,
And close your eyes with holy dread,
For he on honey-dew hath fed,
And drunk the milk of Paradise.”
For surely, if any author can be said to have drunk the milk of Paradise, it would be Lawrence Durrell. His lyricism is dazzling. Similar to James Joyce, who makes up words as he goes, Durrell seems to make up meanings and allusions. It matters not if you understand the reference. Fragments drift by themselves through the air and shimmer like summer fireflies.
This is not to say that Monsieur is mere pretty fluff. The book is a trapdoor, a wormhole, a black hole to suck you into the Avignon Quintet. And once you step through the void, you need something equivalent in time and will to the price of an expensive ticket to put down Durrell and get back to your TBR list.
There is for example the gravitational draw of the subject matters. Take your pick. Gnosticism, for example, is explored in depth and appears to be a major influence on several characters. And perhaps it may be engendering a suicide cult? Sexual triads, for another example, are examined for their effect on gender and personality. And if those weren't enough, there's the seductive mystery of the sins of the Knights Templar.
And permeating the novel, like the whiff of frankincense in a priest's domicile, is the "romantic melancholy of desuetude" - Durrell's passionate rendering of Avignon and Provence.
For students of literary theory, Monsieur presents a model of experimental modernist writing. Durrell goes so far as to address issues suggested by the science of physics: relativity theory and indeterminacy. Such as Heisenberg's concept that by observing matter, we change it, and the concept that matter can act like both a particle and a wave at the same time. For example, Durrell creates Blanford, a novelist who creates Sutcliffe another novelist - with whom he, Blanford, ultimately converses and consults about mutualities. And Sutcliffe satirizes Blanford with a character he, in turn, creates, called Blosford.
So then, what is this magic Q, this grand quincunx? With circular references, and overlapping characters, and magnetic language, Durrell creates a unique particle accelerator for characters. Ultimately, to whirl and twirl and smash them together to find new truths and prove ancient ones. Unlike Blanford, a man given to staring intently into the mirror until he stands outside himself, I've taken an opposite turn and fallen through Durrell's looking glass. So? A Prince of Darkness? Beware? Beware?
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into the exhibit. An introduction to Durrell's Monsieur: or The Prince of Darkness should begin in a similar spirit with a sign "This way to the Quincunx!"
A sign which includes a caution from Coleridge's Xanadu:
“And all should cry, Beware! Beware!
His flashing eyes, his floating hair!
Weave a circle round him thrice,
And close your eyes with holy dread,
For he on honey-dew hath fed,
And drunk the milk of Paradise.”
For surely, if any author can be said to have drunk the milk of Paradise, it would be Lawrence Durrell. His lyricism is dazzling. Similar to James Joyce, who makes up words as he goes, Durrell seems to make up meanings and allusions. It matters not if you understand the reference. Fragments drift by themselves through the air and shimmer like summer fireflies.
This is not to say that Monsieur is mere pretty fluff. The book is a trapdoor, a wormhole, a black hole to suck you into the Avignon Quintet. And once you step through the void, you need something equivalent in time and will to the price of an expensive ticket to put down Durrell and get back to your TBR list.
There is for example the gravitational draw of the subject matters. Take your pick. Gnosticism, for example, is explored in depth and appears to be a major influence on several characters. And perhaps it may be engendering a suicide cult? Sexual triads, for another example, are examined for their effect on gender and personality. And if those weren't enough, there's the seductive mystery of the sins of the Knights Templar.
And permeating the novel, like the whiff of frankincense in a priest's domicile, is the "romantic melancholy of desuetude" - Durrell's passionate rendering of Avignon and Provence.
For students of literary theory, Monsieur presents a model of experimental modernist writing. Durrell goes so far as to address issues suggested by the science of physics: relativity theory and indeterminacy. Such as Heisenberg's concept that by observing matter, we change it, and the concept that matter can act like both a particle and a wave at the same time. For example, Durrell creates Blanford, a novelist who creates Sutcliffe another novelist - with whom he, Blanford, ultimately converses and consults about mutualities. And Sutcliffe satirizes Blanford with a character he, in turn, creates, called Blosford.
So then, what is this magic Q, this grand quincunx? With circular references, and overlapping characters, and magnetic language, Durrell creates a unique particle accelerator for characters. Ultimately, to whirl and twirl and smash them together to find new truths and prove ancient ones. Unlike Blanford, a man given to staring intently into the mirror until he stands outside himself, I've taken an opposite turn and fallen through Durrell's looking glass. So? A Prince of Darkness? Beware? Beware?
Show Less
LibraryThing member Cecilturtle
I finally managed to plod through this long, convoluted and disjointed book. A story within a story, dreams and hallucinations make the plot almost impossible to understand; the characters are not particularly endearing and the dark religious allusions are confusing at best. It is very well written
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though... Show Less
LibraryThing member isabelx
I sat there among these fragments of the great puzzle of Rob's unfinished novel whose dismembered fragments littered the muniments room, and heard Toby picking out his one-fingered tune, merciless as a woodpecker. "Sylvie." She raised her dark head and gazed at me abstractedly, her eyes still full
This book starts with Bruce, a doctor approaching retirement, being called back to France after the suspicious death of his brother-in-law and lover Piers. Eventually Bruce starts to suspect that Piers' supposed suicide may be related to his gnostic beliefs. As young men, Bruce and Piers were both posted to Egypt, Piers as a French diplomat, and Bruce as a doctor working for the British embassy. Along with their friend Toby and Piers' sister Sylvie who had come out to Egypt to visit them, they met a gnostic mystic called Akkad, although only Piers fell entirely under his spell and went on to become a life-long gnostic.
In the 1930s, before Bruce and Piers joined the diplomatic service, when Bruce, Piers and Sylvie are living in an ancient chateau near Avignon in a ménage à trois. before they are visited by their friend Toby, a historian writing a book about the Templars based on documents found in the chateau, and by Sutcliffe, Toby's friend and Bruce's former brother-in-law.
But The Avignon Quintet is a work of metafiction, so things aren't that simple, as it soon becomes clear that all the people mentioned above are characters invented by an author called Blanford.
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of playing cards and their magic.This book starts with Bruce, a doctor approaching retirement, being called back to France after the suspicious death of his brother-in-law and lover Piers. Eventually Bruce starts to suspect that Piers' supposed suicide may be related to his gnostic beliefs. As young men, Bruce and Piers were both posted to Egypt, Piers as a French diplomat, and Bruce as a doctor working for the British embassy. Along with their friend Toby and Piers' sister Sylvie who had come out to Egypt to visit them, they met a gnostic mystic called Akkad, although only Piers fell entirely under his spell and went on to become a life-long gnostic.
In the 1930s, before Bruce and Piers joined the diplomatic service, when Bruce, Piers and Sylvie are living in an ancient chateau near Avignon in a ménage à trois. before they are visited by their friend Toby, a historian writing a book about the Templars based on documents found in the chateau, and by Sutcliffe, Toby's friend and Bruce's former brother-in-law.
But The Avignon Quintet is a work of metafiction, so things aren't that simple, as it soon becomes clear that all the people mentioned above are characters invented by an author called Blanford.
Show Less
LibraryThing member mbmackay
The Alexandra Quartet was such a success that it seems that Durrell was inclined to repeat the recipe in this first volume of the Avignon Quintet. But what might have seemed fresh and interesting the first time round becomes stale and formulaic when repeated. This book was a struggle. The remaining
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four volumes of the Quintet will be a serious challenge. Read July 2011. Show Less
LibraryThing member ritaer
odd book, pushed through but did not really enjoy
LibraryThing member MFHUNTER
complete genius..........I have never been so pleased with this seminal writer as with how I am towards this book.durrell is a master of diction and metaphor!
LibraryThing member Katong
Overwritten, but I have a soft-spot for Durrell.
LibraryThing member devmae
I just wanted to read another Alexandria Quartet. Not nearly as good, but similar enough that I finished it.
LibraryThing member therebelprince
We were latecomers to the place, modern scavengers of history upon a scene which had, it seems, long since exhausted all its historical potentialities.
So, there's this author, right? And he's writing a work about characters based on acquaintances of his, but one of the characters is writing his
Or maybe all of that is a lie.
The question of who, and what, is real seems likely to occupy the future novels in Durrell's "quincunx", but in Monsieur, the first of the five, there are bigger issues at stake. A man is dead, his sister has gone mad, and they're all wondering about their gradual awakening to the possibilities of Gnostic mysticism and whether there's a Prince of Darkness rising to usurp the dying/dead God.
It's all a bit heavy.
I adore Durrell's Alexandria Quartet utterly and completely, and I think, in Monsieur (written more than a decade later when the author was at the end of middle-age), he intensifies what made the earlier work great, but also his flaws are writ large.
The good: Durrell's incisive character work is on display, with flurries of imaginative writing, particularly in the scenes at the Macabru oasis. And his descriptive powers are on point! From an astonishing vision of a crumbling chateau at Christmas to the Nile in all its glory. The poet side of Durrell can expound for pages at a time, capturing the most minute moments and transforming them into sublime highlights.
On the other side of the coin, Durrell is undoubtedly a problematic writer for those of us young people in the 21st century. His white men are all hopeless drunks with university degrees and penchants for uttering half a paragraph in French or Latin (with no helpful footnote to translate); his Jews are always troubled by their feelings of dissatisfaction with their race; his women eternally prone to madness and simplicity; and his Arabs fascinating and enigmatic but also always slightly pitiable. And the less said about the novel's only black character, a jazz-playing, adulteress named Trash who has a seeming inability to grasp the beauty of Western art, the better. I don't think this inherently ruins the book. Durrell, after all, was hardly a stern, racist Britisher. He spent the vast majority of his life outside of England and essentially renounced it altogether. He was fascinated by the people and cultures of the Middle East and North Africa, and by the Jews, as evidenced by his choices of locations, wives, mistresses, etc, throughout his life. Like a lot of educated Sahibs of his era, Durrell wasn't a racist, but he saw the world in a manner perhaps best described as culturalist. People are products of their culture, and people do fall into a lot of broad generalisations - so goes the theory - and the fact that his most penetrating characters are often educated English men is because those are the people he could best understand. The novel's many distressing statements certainly will prevent Durrell from becoming popular any time soon, and I don't think we should ignore his problematic status as a writer. But we also must remember that at no point in this book is Lawrence Durrell the narrator. The book is set thirty years before it was written, and each chapter has a narrative voice. It's complex. Not so complex as to deny there are significant problems, but also not as easy as some readers would like to make it out to be*.
*(All this is written from the standpoint of an educated white male, albeit a gay one, so I'm not claiming in any way to speak objectively about the situation!)
The first half of the book is certainly stronger. The second half collapses a little under the weight of its collective conceits. The 'scraps' and 'vignettes' idea worked better in Alexandria, where Pursewarden (who receives a delightful and meta-textual name check here!) had a true pizzazz about him, the most bitter Thersites the writing world has ever known. Here, a lot of the second half is borderline incomprehensible, although part of it is to do with the fact that Durrell is old enough to be my great-grandfather, and was born in a different country in a different time. The meanings his clique could extract from an ambiguous line would be far different than the equivalent for mine. Being fairly well read, I was faring better than most, delighting in the subtle references to Proust and Shakespeare, for example, but I think Avignon is even less likely to gain a new generation of fervent acolytes than Alexandria is. Nevertheless, the beauty and density here is incredible, even if I have little time for the more hokier superstitious elements that have little merit in the 21st century. I shall carry out to the rest of the Quintet, intrigued to see whether this Angkor Wat of a work becomes more viable with each addition to the structure, or more labyrinthine!
I stored up simply a constellation of moments, a firework display of small but brilliant incidents which were like a set of coloured engravings of this great river with its moods and silences, its strange caprices and impulses.
So, there's this author, right? And he's writing a work about characters based on acquaintances of his, but one of the characters is writing his
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own work, and hates the author, and some of the other characters are writing their own diaries, in which they sometimes doubt the authenticity of each other's works.Or maybe all of that is a lie.
The question of who, and what, is real seems likely to occupy the future novels in Durrell's "quincunx", but in Monsieur, the first of the five, there are bigger issues at stake. A man is dead, his sister has gone mad, and they're all wondering about their gradual awakening to the possibilities of Gnostic mysticism and whether there's a Prince of Darkness rising to usurp the dying/dead God.
It's all a bit heavy.
I adore Durrell's Alexandria Quartet utterly and completely, and I think, in Monsieur (written more than a decade later when the author was at the end of middle-age), he intensifies what made the earlier work great, but also his flaws are writ large.
The good: Durrell's incisive character work is on display, with flurries of imaginative writing, particularly in the scenes at the Macabru oasis. And his descriptive powers are on point! From an astonishing vision of a crumbling chateau at Christmas to the Nile in all its glory. The poet side of Durrell can expound for pages at a time, capturing the most minute moments and transforming them into sublime highlights.
On the other side of the coin, Durrell is undoubtedly a problematic writer for those of us young people in the 21st century. His white men are all hopeless drunks with university degrees and penchants for uttering half a paragraph in French or Latin (with no helpful footnote to translate); his Jews are always troubled by their feelings of dissatisfaction with their race; his women eternally prone to madness and simplicity; and his Arabs fascinating and enigmatic but also always slightly pitiable. And the less said about the novel's only black character, a jazz-playing, adulteress named Trash who has a seeming inability to grasp the beauty of Western art, the better. I don't think this inherently ruins the book. Durrell, after all, was hardly a stern, racist Britisher. He spent the vast majority of his life outside of England and essentially renounced it altogether. He was fascinated by the people and cultures of the Middle East and North Africa, and by the Jews, as evidenced by his choices of locations, wives, mistresses, etc, throughout his life. Like a lot of educated Sahibs of his era, Durrell wasn't a racist, but he saw the world in a manner perhaps best described as culturalist. People are products of their culture, and people do fall into a lot of broad generalisations - so goes the theory - and the fact that his most penetrating characters are often educated English men is because those are the people he could best understand. The novel's many distressing statements certainly will prevent Durrell from becoming popular any time soon, and I don't think we should ignore his problematic status as a writer. But we also must remember that at no point in this book is Lawrence Durrell the narrator. The book is set thirty years before it was written, and each chapter has a narrative voice. It's complex. Not so complex as to deny there are significant problems, but also not as easy as some readers would like to make it out to be*.
*(All this is written from the standpoint of an educated white male, albeit a gay one, so I'm not claiming in any way to speak objectively about the situation!)
The first half of the book is certainly stronger. The second half collapses a little under the weight of its collective conceits. The 'scraps' and 'vignettes' idea worked better in Alexandria, where Pursewarden (who receives a delightful and meta-textual name check here!) had a true pizzazz about him, the most bitter Thersites the writing world has ever known. Here, a lot of the second half is borderline incomprehensible, although part of it is to do with the fact that Durrell is old enough to be my great-grandfather, and was born in a different country in a different time. The meanings his clique could extract from an ambiguous line would be far different than the equivalent for mine. Being fairly well read, I was faring better than most, delighting in the subtle references to Proust and Shakespeare, for example, but I think Avignon is even less likely to gain a new generation of fervent acolytes than Alexandria is. Nevertheless, the beauty and density here is incredible, even if I have little time for the more hokier superstitious elements that have little merit in the 21st century. I shall carry out to the rest of the Quintet, intrigued to see whether this Angkor Wat of a work becomes more viable with each addition to the structure, or more labyrinthine!
I stored up simply a constellation of moments, a firework display of small but brilliant incidents which were like a set of coloured engravings of this great river with its moods and silences, its strange caprices and impulses.
Show Less
Awards
James Tait Black Memorial Prize (Winner — Fiction — 1974)
Pages
305
ISBN
0670486787 / 9780670486786