The artistic prestige of the work illuminates the author, but casts a shadow over his other creations. A shadow of interpretation, I think. A continuation or deepening of the emblematic work is always expected. And sometimes the so-called minor or secondary works are never reached. It almost happened to me with Lawrence Durrell, the author of the book Alexandria Quartet. These are four novels published between 1957 and 1960, and each of them has the title: Justin, Balthazar, mountolive and Clea. They are always available even in pocket editions. His readers abound, a fraternity in which this work is usually part of their sentimental education, a kaleidoscope of love and sex. Instead The Avignon Quintetpublished almost twenty years later, between 1974 and 1985, and also titled by the names –Monsieur, Livia, Constance, Sebastian and QuinxIt’s harder to find. A long time ago I tried to read the first volume of the book Quintet -which have subtitles next to the name in each of the five titles- I think Monsieur or Prince of Darkness. It didn’t grab me at that point and I didn’t continue reading. And here comes the reason: I expected to find that magic Alexandria Quartet, which I read when I was twenty and re-read twice. A long time later I just walked into the Quintet for other reasons: understanding how a writer’s mind works over time, especially when there is a major work in his career that has marked him and his readers. Does that prestige aspire? How can a writer escape from that fame? Does it go against it or deepen it? I am also interested in understanding the difference in the reception of one work and another: does the environment in which it was published also interfere? Can readers get past the imprint? Is there any aspect of creation that distances itself from the expectations and prejudices of the time?

I finally managed to cross that line of unread as someone who overcomes her own shortcomings and goes against fashion trends. What do I find? I will give a provisional answer as I have just finished the third volume of the book Quintet. There is more complexity to begin with. It covers many more years than in the tetralogy and much more space. The title can be misleading: the action does not take place only in that ancient city in the south of France, although it is its referential core. Novels of Quintet they travel between Paris, Geneva, of course Alexandria and Cairo, but also pass through Germany. This inconsistency of the work with one time and place sends a signal about the nature of the same author. One of the problems in Lawrence Durrell’s profile lies in his multiple identities: of British parents, he was born in India. He returned to England at the age of eleven, and at twenty-three he again went to live in Corfu, Crete, Paris, Alexandria, Cyprus, for a while he even lived in Argentina and Belgrade, and then he settled in France, in a small town an hour away .of Avignon: Sommieres. As with another English writer, Malcolm Lowry, the author under the volcano, their works do not have a close identification with their countries of origin. It is a problem of reception, an inherited anachronism in the way of reading, whereby the reader seems to expect a close correspondence or unity between the nationality of the author and the centrality of the country as setting. It seems that we are not reading works but countries, the heritage of the old realist school (of nationalistic fundamental origin) which has been far surpassed by the global migration reality, and which is beginning to spread what used to belong to the exceptionalism of individual writers. . Durrell is one of them. He Quartet is located in Alexandria, as a real space for immigrants, especially of British origin, centered on one narrator (with the exception of the third volume, mountolive, told in the third person). That doesn’t happen with Quintet: the flow of the script and narrator is multiple. And the use of a single narrator in the first person does not play a big role. The relationship between reality and fiction is also questioned.

Monsieur or Prince of Darkness is about the return of the character, Bruce, to Avignon due to the death of his friend Piers. Sylvie, Piers’ sister and Bruce’s wife, also lives in Avignon. Silvie has mental disorders and lives in a psychiatric institution. The novel evokes the journey of the three protagonists to the outskirts of Alexandria to discover, in the hands of the Egyptian Akkad, an enclave of the Gnostic sect. Shortly after it is revealed that what has been read is part of an unfinished novel by Rob Sutcliffe, which in turn is the creation of another novelist, Blanford. IN Livia or buried alive the “real” lives of Blanford, sisters Livia and Constance are connected to the “fictional” lives of other characters. In the third volume, Constance, the water clears (relatively) and we have a slightly more transparent novel. World War II broke out and the Nazis invaded France. The “real” characters are subjected to the global consequences of the conflict. The clash could not have been better chosen. The horror of war puts pressure on relationships and the feeling of love, one of Durrell’s great obsessions. Is what happens in war an extreme reality or a parenthesis? Brackets from what? Once the everyday is broken down, the barriers between fiction and reality are also broken down. The novel becomes porous, characters jump from place to place, patterns are revealed: Sutcliffe, the created novelist, meets Blanford, his creator.

So far we have a non-naturalistic, anti-mimetic, global, postmodern novel. If you’ll be patient, we’ll see what the last two volumes bring us at the next stop. (OR)