Reviews for Clea

The average rating for Clea based on 2 reviews is 4 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2020-12-24 00:00:00 Keith Foster Would it not, I wondered, be wiser to stay where I was? Perhaps. Yet I knew I must go. Indeed this very night I should be gone! The thought itself was so hard to grasp that I was forced to whisper it aloud to myself. * Dawn was breaking among the olives, silvering their still leaves. * How could I help but think of the past towards which we were returning across the dense thickets of time, across the familiar pathways of the Greek sea? The night slid past me, an unrolling ribbon of darkness. The warm sea-wind brushed my cheek — soft as the brush of a fox. Between sleep and waking I lay, feeling the tug of memory’s heavy plumb-line: tug of the leaf-veined city which my memory had peopled with masks, malign and beautiful at once. * ‘Yet the truth’ I said ‘is that I feel no resentment for the past. On the contrary I am full of gratitude because an experience which was perhaps banal in itself (even disgusting for you) was for me immeasurably enriching!’ * But now, then, tell me — which of us was the greater liar? I cheated you, you cheated yourself. * Perhaps our only sickness is to desire a truth which we cannot bear rather than to rest content with the fictions we manufacture out of each other.’ * I wasn’t sure that the cycle would really change, I didn’t know how much you had or hadn’t changed yourself. You are such a bloody correspondent I hadn’t any way of judging about your inside state of mind. Such a long time since you wrote, isn’t it? * But I am aware the test may come under any guise, perhaps even in the physical world by a blow between the eyes or a few lines scribbled in pencil on the back of an envelope left in a café. The heraldic reality can strike from any point, above or below: it is not particular. But without it the enigma will remain. You may travel round the world and colonize the ends of the earth with your lines and yet never hear the singing yourself. * Yes, one day I found myself writing down with trembling fingers the four words (four letters! four faces!) with which every story-teller since the world began has staked his slender claim to the attention of his fellow-men. Words which presage simply the old story of an artist coming of age. I wrote: ‘Once upon a time….’ And I felt as if the whole universe had given me a nudge!

Review # 2 was written on 2014-03-01 00:00:00 Timothy Leto The final part of the Quartet and it’s been a wonderful journey. Not quite as strong, I thought, as the other three. It is set about seven years later. Darley has been living on a Greek island looking after Melissa’s daughter (with Nessim). Balthasar arrives with information and writing from the late Pursewarden. Many of the aps from the previous novels are filled in. Darley returns to Alexandria, reuniting Nessim with his daughter. He bumps into Clea and begins a romantic relationship with her. It is Clea and her relationship with Darley that takes centre stage. The Quartet seems to hang together as a result of this novel and the prose is still wonderful. There were one or two ends that didn’t quite convince me (Justine for instance), but on the whole again Durrell has created a masterpiece. Darley is as short-sighted as ever when it comes to his romantic entanglements. The events of the war intertwine this novel and Alexandria is in the hands of the Free French. There are some neat comic touches; the late cross-dressing Scobie is now an unofficial saint and has his own feast day. All of the main participants take some sort of bow. Durrell indulges himself in all sorts of meditations covering art, the novel and creativity, set within the outstanding writing and the Freudian allusions. The fragments from Pursewarden add a great deal and an edge of cynicism and weirdness. At the centre of it all though is the nature of love and more particularly how miserable it can make you! The whole thing is a look at modern civilisation and its decadence. I also think Durrell is looking at the nature of truth because he looks at events from several different angles and points of view making the reader question their original judgement. The Quartet is a great achievement and the prose so beautiful it defies description. I enjoyed the first three slightly more than this one, but they stand alone as a whole.