This image is the cover for the book Reflections on a Marine Venus

Reflections on a Marine Venus

After World War II, an Englishman seeks peace on an ancient Greek island in this “remarkable” travel memoir (The New York Times).
 Islomania is a disease not yet classified by Western science, but to those afflicted its symptoms are all too recognizable. Men like Lawrence Durrell are struck by a powerful need to live on the ancient islands of the Mediterranean, where the clear blue Aegean is always within reach. After four tortuous wartime years in Egypt, Durrell finds a post on the island of Rhodes, where the British are attempting to return Greece to the sleepy peace it enjoyed in the ’30s. From his first morning, when a dip in the frigid sea jolts him awake for what feels like the first time in years, Durrell breathes in the fullest joys of island life, meeting villagers, eating exotic food, and throwing back endless bottles of ouzo, as though the war had never happened at all. The charms of his stay there still resonate today, for the pleasures of Greece are older than history itself.

Lawrence Durrell

Born in Jalandhar, British India, in 1912 to Indian-born British colonials, Lawrence Durrell was a critically hailed and beloved novelist, poet, humorist, and travel writer best known for the Alexandria Quartet novels, which were ranked by the Modern Library as among the greatest works of English literature in the twentieth century. A passionate and dedicated writer from an early age, Durrell’s prolific career also included the groundbreaking Avignon Quintet, whose first novel, Monsieur (1974), won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, and whose third novel, Constance (1982), was nominated for the Booker Prize. He also penned the celebrated travel memoir Bitter Lemons of Cyprus (1957), which won the Duff Cooper Prize. Durrell corresponded with author Henry Miller for forty-five years, and Miller influenced much of his early work, including a provocative and controversial novel, The Black Book (1938). Durrell died in France in 1990.  

Open Road Integrated Media