![]() ![]() In place of a single complex life story or family narrative, De Bernières introduces and sets in motion a mob of characters restricted, necessarily as in Dickens, to a single salient characteristic. It is a place, as one might expect from De Bernières, that is folksy, capricious, sentimental, superstitious, good-hearted and brutal in the extreme. A beautiful Christian girl makes veiling all the rage, while the village molla halts the stoning of an adulteress by appealing not merely to the sharia but to the doctrines of Jesus, son of Mary. ![]() ![]() This is Eskibahce, now just another ghost town on Turkey's southern shore but once a place where Christians and Muslims lived in friendly intimacy, illiterate in both Greek and Turkish, and more alike than they knew. Louis de Bernières has chosen in place of a sophisticated commercial city of the 1930s a picturesque village on the Lycian coast in about 1900. The swansong of exotic English literary modernism, The Alexandria Quartet is now the deadest of dead dogs. A brilliant and overdue Levantine society worked out its destiny in prose as honeyed and indigestible as Oriental confectionery. ![]() Romantic nostalgia for a lost world of pashas and cohabitation prompted Lawrence Durrell to write The Alexandria Quartet of 1957-60. ![]()
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