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Reflections on a Marine Venus
A Companion to the Landscape of Rhodes
By Lawrence Durrell
“Νο person, place, or thing can ever quite remain the same for us after we have seen, smelled, tasted, heard, and felt it through the senses of Lawrence Durrell.”
—Saturday Review
“Durrell…communicat[es] his gusto for Greek ruins, wild flowers, Patmian monks, forged bus tickets, the violet, alluring sea, and pilgrimages embellished by traditional dancing beside barbeques. . . .”
—Raymond Mortimer (Sunday Times)
Summary
Reflections on a Marine Venus, a very personal memoir by leading 20th century novelist Lawrence Durrell, explores life on a magical and enchanting island (Rhodes) right after World War II. It is about Greece when it was a demiparadise. But it is also about the distillation of life and experience, the savoring of all the exquisite pleasures, physical, sensual, and intellectual, available on one lovely island at one time, and that might still be there for us to discover in our own time.
Here is a brief excerpt selected by a reviewer on Amazon.com:
"The author goes for a midnight swim in the final chapter: 'The [moon]light filters down a full fathom or more to where, on the dark blackboard of weed, broken here and there by dazzling areas of milk-white sand, the fish float as if dazed by their own violet shadows which follow them back and forth, sprawling across the sea's floor.'"
About the Author
Lawrence Durrell was born of British parents in India in 1912 and died living in France in 1990. He is best known as the author of The Alexandria Quartet, a series of four novels set in Egypt, but wrote many other novels, travel memoirs, poems, plays, and humorous sketches. Reflections on a Marine Venus is regarded by many as a masterpiece.
