I’m finishing reading the last two volumes of Lawrence Durrell’s quintet of Avignon novels: Sebastián or the domain of passionand Quinx or the story of a murderer. In short, a maze. I’m still not out of it. I don’t know if it is possible to get out and if the author left the keys ready or threw them out the window when he finished his work. As with Proust, you have to read it again: interruptions leave gaps that must be pressed again by the reader’s story. The thread of the plot would serve to keep rags in the air of the mind of a complex and witty novelist like Lawrence Durrell. world war ended Constance, the eponymous protagonist waits in Geneva for the return of Affad-Akkad, her Egyptian lover. The game of overlapping names is part of that boundary that Durrell breaks in his novel in order to question where we are moving. Affad-Akkad wanted to dissolve his attachment to a mysterious Gnostic sect in Cairo, but it turns out that when he arrives, a ritual planned for the fate of its members is activated: they send a letter to Geneva indicating that he is about to die. There are no rational explanations in this sect’s sacrificial game. What is unexpected is that the letter gets lost in Geneva and ends up in the wrong hands, unleashing a classic novelistic intrigue that ends in Affad’s final, completely unforeseen death. Durrell’s concessions to the intrigue of the novel, the result is what matters: Constance lost her husband Sam in the third novel, and in this fourth she lost her Egyptian lover. This is where the maturity of Constance’s fascinating personality stands out in all its glory, it is a real axis The Avignon Quintet amid the delirious fun of doubling and tripling identities.

From Alexandria to Avignon, the first stop

I have alluded to Proust on the management of time and the interruptions of a vast history, but the key is Shakespeare, understood in the unfolding of the mind with hundreds of characters and the biased humor that runs through it in the dark ambiguity of Falstaff, sonnets., of storm. Durrel rejected England, but not Shakespeare. He is clear in his references and does what he wants, above all he shows the process by which the novelist’s mind works with a hyper-awareness of permeable limits. In his own way, with the obvious challenge of sorting out the thousands of motifs, situations and people that could feed fiction, he suggests that the mind of a human being works in an identical way to his own life. Do the people around us really have a clear and defined identity? Can we apply cognitive bias and simplify, in the fast and efficient economy of the cerebral amygdala, intended to quickly resolve conflict situations, realities that are much more complex? Durrell seems to indicate to us that what we consider an attribute of imagination in fictions is as accurate an arrangement as possible in its manifold confusion against the pure story of realism which mutilates and reduces to calm down.

“Mankind cannot bear much reality,” goes the oft-quoted line of TS Eliot. I had to reconsider its meaning: it is not reality itself that humanity cannot bear, but all the possibilities of the real that fictions show simultaneously. This is where I find the essential difference between Alexandria Quartet and The Avignon Quintet. Both of Durrell’s masterpieces depict human multiplicity, but there is a difference in a decisive way. In it Quartetthe unique voice of the narrator, Darley, in all three volumes, and the narrator in the fourth volume, mountolive, are sufficient and remain to resist dispersion. He Quartet it is bifocal: two narrators, two registers. He Quintet it is entropic: perspectives and voices explode, there are multiple narrators, sometimes even indeterminate narrators, overlapping voices, poems and fragments that appear with or without attribution, and a dialectical play between the novelist Blanford and his creation, the novelist Sutcliffe, who gradually he takes on a schizophrenic role, both in the mind of his creator and in the reality he attacks as another protagonist. Gifted with a variety of characters, Durrell achieves masterful moments with Smirgel, the German double spy who uncovers the story of Livia’s death and the cause of her eye loss, to the scandal with Constance, and opens a trail for the end of the party to solve the unresolved issue of the Templar treasure that dragged out part of the novel. With the letters revealed, the novel continues in the dissolution of the branches of the delta: the waters mix with each other, and the reader progresses because it is impossible to return. When the last horizon opens, the reader has joined the characters’ trip to the cave where said treasure is said to be: in the procession are Lord Galen, the Prince of Egypt, Felix Chatto, Smirgel, Blanford and Constance. Will they find him? Or are they waiting for the uncertainty of the bomb system planted by the Austrian sappers who, in retreat, gave up cooperating with the Nazis to destroy Avignon, which is why they were shot? We do not know. I don’t even want to doubt that. The novel ends with a few words that Blanford would have liked in the case of writing the scene: “Ultimate reality rushed to the aid of fiction and the completely unpredictable began to happen.”

The mind of the writer that was Lawrence Durrell moved to much more complex terrain after his fame Quartet. He did not surpass him in terms of fluidity and balance, no doubt weighed down by the pressure of success. He The Avignon Quintet the sin of too rapid transitions, unsettled assimilation of conflicts, excessive two ex machinathe trail of stumbling characters along the way, but also the joyous freedom of the multiple plot and diabolical humor that finally found an outlet in the merciless paths of imperfection. (OR)