Еще раз подчеркну, у меня нет в этом мероприятии никакого персонального интереса. Поскольку уже 22 человека высказали такое пожелание, и только четверо - против, я продолжу, пока по индивидуальным заказам. Как я уже говорил, это не литературоведение, а просто читательские эмоции. Итак, просили впечатления от Александрийского квартета.

The Alexandria Quartet by Lawrence Durrell

Imagine looking at a carpet of interwoven brightly colored threads that do not seem to form any apparent pattern, but that is only because you do not have your glasses on and your vision is blurred. You see many colors amalgamated in splats of varying hues, so that the whole picture is pleasant for the eye, albeit not sophisticated. Then you put on the glasses and you can see that pools of colors that you had seen before are not uniform, but made of individual strings that meander through the entire carpet without any visible system, but penetrating and embracing each other in a complicate way, yet preserving each its own identity all the way through. Next, you put the carpet on the wall and under a side light you start noticing that seemingly random meandering has its own system, whose logic still escapes you, but you are sure it’s there. Finally, you bring in an infrared light that shows you that the substrate, the backing of the tapestry, is a highly organized imagery itself, and the woven threads reflect the perfect organization of this backing. This is about how this tetralogy unravels and reveals, with each volume, more and more intricate, and at the same time more logical exposition of the same set of events. My mini-review would have been incomplete had I not mentioned the refined Durrell’s prose (this is one of those books that I was not able to consume in audio form), starting with the famous opening line: “A sky of hot nude pearl until midday, crickets in sheltered places, and now the wind unpacking the great planes, ransacking the great planes…”

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