Lawrence Durrell

Lawrence Durrell, as fine a writer as there was and is, whose reputation is in decline, is one of those writers you read as a writer, which means the story he writes means less than the language used to tell it.

Durrell writes about a world that no longer exists and his characters seem to yearn for this world wherever they are, even when they're mucking around in their own precious present. Durrell makes the past so real for his reader that his reader can see no future.

We say we'd like to know the future but if we knew the future we wouldn't really want to know what we knew. The future would become so true to us that it might become a place either terrifying or banal, where what we knew would keep us forever from knowing or wanting to know.