Cities, and the people that make them
“The city, half-imagined (yet wholly real), begins and ends in us, roots lodged in our memory.”
-Lawrence Durrell, in Balthazar
More recommended books for urbanites (and anyone fond of beautiful prose) are those in the Alexandria Quartet by Lawrence Durrell. It is a collection of four books, set in the city of Alexandria on the eve of the second World War. You are there, inside the tangled lives of a handful of inhabitants of Alexandria, transported by fine prose and sensual details. Through the lives of the book’s characters you feel the pulse of the old, harsh city. Though clearly fixed in its time and place, it is also timeless-the Alexandria of these pages is a city of mixed religion, ethnicities, heavy with history, burdened with the entanglements of friends and lovers. I am still reading through the quartet, enjoying every word, every line.
