[ilds] Evaluating the Quintet

[Bruce Redwine]

Ravi, whom I respect, reports that Durrell apparently thought the Quintet his best work.  I doubt the truth of his statement, but my opinion is just that, an opinion.  I don’t, however, think that authors are necessarily the best judge of their own art.  Hemingway thought that Across the River and into the Trees (1950) was his best novel.  He even compared it to some kind of literary “calculus,” whereas his previous novels, presumably, were simply works of arithmetic.  Who believes that nowadays?  Few if any, I think.  Durrell had his own philosophy (some mix of Indian and Chinese thought), but his real genius as a writer of fiction was a blend of storytelling and poetry.  I don’t see this in the Quintet and think that Durrell went off the deep-end and got lost in the netherworld of his own dark obsessions (the philosophy not withstanding, which is of great interest, but which doesn’t save the whole enterprise from its own self-destruction).

Bruce





> On Sep 27, 2016, at 9:12 AM, Ravi Nambiar <cnncravi at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> Dear Bruce
> Your statement, "I think the success of the Quartet depends on literature, whereas the lack of success of the Quintet depends on philosophy", prompted me to collect some of Durrell's own words from the interviews he gave:
> "...this quintet is more important to me than the Alexandria Quartet".
> "Avignon Quintet will be my last book, a present to France."
> "The English don't very much like ideas and abstraction."
> "The book is really written for learned people."
> "The Avignon Quintet is an intellectual autobiography." 
> "Quartet, the hurly-burly and ripening of experience, quintet the acceptance of reality."
> "The Alexandria Quartet takes into account Western psychology, dualism, and ambivalence."
> "The Quintet accordingly offers a solution: the East as a way out for the West. Things are so simple, nor so abstract."
> 
> It is agreed by almost all D scholars that to understand Durrell, one has to read all of his work. The Quartet, the four, slides into the five, the Quintet ("five baskets of experience"): unlike in the quartet, "...in the quintet the last page is really the last page."
> Regards
> Ravi
> 

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