15 December 2011

“The Books Get Better and Better”: Amitav Ghosh Reflects upon The Alexandria Quartet.

Amitav Ghosh’s appreciation for The Alexandria Quartet is well-documented.  (Check here for a catalog of Ghosh’s numerous acknowledgments of Lawrence Durrell.)

In a recent posting at his blog-site, Ghosh once again turns to thinking about The Alexandria Quartet.  On this occasion, Ghosh shares some afterthoughts about completing Clea, the last novel in the tetralogy:

Finished reading Clea yesterday. Was more or less in tears at the end of it.  The books get better and better.  I think the blurb is on the whole right: The Alexandria Quartet is probably as close to a masterpiece as anything written in the ’50s.

Particularly liked Durrell’s translation of the Cavafy poem at the end.  (Must look for a Cavafy collection when I am in Alexandria next: wonder if I’ll find one?)

The dateline for these remarks — “May 29, 1980 | [‘Lataifa’, Egypt]” — suggests that Ghosh excerpted his reflections on Clea from a diary he kept while living in Egypt in the early 1980s.  The publication of this diary entry also suggests just how long Ghosh’s fascination with The Alexandria Quartet has lasted, 1980 – 2011.

For Ghosh’s reminisces about reading Durrell while living in Alexandria, see the autobiographical sketch published at the Penguin Books site for The Ibis Trilogy.

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26 November 2011

“Out of the Blue”: British Library Marks 2012 Durrell Centenary with New Audio Collection.

Just in time for Durrell 2012: The Lawrence Durrell Centenary, the British Library has released an audio CD of interviews, songs, and poetry – The Spoken Word: Lawrence Durrell.

The press kit for The Spoken Word: Lawrence Durrell describes the audio collection as follows:

2012 marks the centenary of the birth of novelist and poet Lawrence Durrell, one of the leading writers of the post-war years.  Born in India and resident at various times in England, Greece, Egypt, Cyprus and France, Durrell was a cosmopolitan, whose work was greatly influenced by the Mediterranean places and cultures he experienced.  His most famous work is The Alexandria Quartet, a series of novels produced in rapid succession between 1957 and 1960.

This disc contains a selection of previously unreleased historic BBC broadcasts in which Durrell reads his poetry and discusses his life and work, together with a unique pair of private recordings of Durrell as jazz pianist and vocalist.

Rachel Foss, Lead Curator for Modern Literary Manuscripts at the British Library, writes:

We’re delighted to be able to bring to a wider audience these rare recordings. They highlight the inter-relationship between Lawrence Durrell’s interests in art, philosophy and science and between genre and form, which make him so complex, fascinating and original a writer. The British Library’s new Spoken Word CD is one of the many ways in which Durrell’s creative legacy will be explored in 2012, his centenary year.

The contents of The Spoken Word: Lawrence Durrell include:

  • Two of a Kind (Lawrence Durrell sings and plays jazz song on the piano;  private recording: 1935).
  • Intimations (Interview with Lawrence Durrell: 1965).
  • Logos (Lawrence Durrell reading poem: 1963).
  • The Poet (Lawrence Durrell reading poem: 1963).
  • Alexandria (Lawrence Durrell reading poem: 1963).
  • The Tree of Idleness (Lawrence Durrell reading poem: 1963).
  • Conversations (Interview with Lawrence Durrell: 1963).
  • Style (Lawrence Durrell reading poem: 1963).
  • Cities, Plains and People VIII (Lawrence Durrell reading poem: 1963).
  • The Anecdotes, IV at Rhodes (Lawrence Durrell reading poem: 1963).
  • On Ithaca Standing (Lawrence Durrell reading poem: 1963).
  • Cavafy (Lawrence Durrell reading poem: 1963).
  • Night Express (Lawrence Durrell reading poem: 1963).
  • Bere Regis (Lawrence Durrell reading poem: 1963).
  • The Octagon Room (Lawrence Durrell reading poem: 1963).
  • Meridian (Interview with Lawrence Durrell: 1985).
  • Out of the Blue (Lawrence Durrell sings and plays jazz song on the piano;  private recording: 1935).

With the release of this audio collection, Lawrence Durrell joins a noteworthy roster of writers highlighted in the British Library Spoken Word series.

Previous releases in the series have included readings by H. G. Wells, George Bernard Shaw, Evelyn Waugh, Edith Sitwell, Robert Graves, Graham Greene, Aldous Huxley, W. H. Auden, Sylvia Plath, Ted Hughes, and Stevie Smith.

The British Library is located a short 0.6 miles away from Goodenough College, the main venue for Durrell 2012: The Lawrence Durrell Centenary.

On Friday, 15 June 2012, the British Library will host an afternoon of archival exhibitions, lectures, and other events related to the 2012 Durrell Centenary.  These events are open to the public — all are welcome!

See a draft schedule of Durrell Centenary Events here.

Order The Spoken Word: Lawrence Durrell from the British Library Shop.

Order The Spoken Word: Lawrence Durrell from Amazon.

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22 October 2011

“The Words Are So Lovely”: Durrell’s Sappho to Premiere as Opera in 2012.

Durrell 2012: The Lawrence Durrell Centenary is delighted to announce a major musical event scheduled for the Centenary year.

Owls Nest Opera will mount the first-ever full-scale recording of Sappho: Opera in Three Acts, with music composed by Peggy Glanville-Hicks and a libretto written by Lawrence Durrell.

The recording of Glanville-Hicks’ 1963 opera will be held in Lisbon in July 2012.  Musical Director Jennifer Condon will conduct the Gulbenkian Orchestra and Chorus, with Deborah Polaski and Sir John Tomlinson taking on the leading roles.

The 2012 CD release of Sappho will occur just in time to mark the centenary celebrations of Glanville-Hicks (1912 – 1990) and Durrell (1912 – 1990).

The San Francisco Opera originally commissioned Glanville-Hicks to adapt Durrell’s Sappho in early 1963.  The Australian composer was an ardent champion of Durrell’s libretto.  She observed that:

[Sappho] is an acting role, par excellence, and a great acting capacity is far more important than a beautiful or famous voice here. The text is fabulous, and the most difficult to set that I’ve ever encountered, simply because the words are so lovely, packed and significant, and I feel all along that they must be heard, the music being scaled down to ensure this.

Kurt Adler, at that time director of the San Francisco Opera (1953 – 1981), shared Glanville-Hicks’ appreciation of Durrell’s libretto.  Adler remarked that Sappho contained “the most beautiful use of the English language of any operatic text I have come across.”

Soprano Maria Callas was originally scheduled to sing the title role.  However, the San Francisco Opera ended up cancelling the 1963 production, and the musical collaboration of Peggy Glanville-Hicks and Lawrence Durrell has never been performed in its entirety — until now.

Jennifer Condon — a young Australian conductor currently working as Souffleuse at the Hamburg State Opera — has tirelessly campaigned to revive Glanville-Hicks’ opera.  Condon offers the following appraisal of Sappho:

The sound palette and colour of this opera is extraordinary, with Peggy’s study of Greek themes and Indian music.  It’s like nothing I have ever come across before.  Lawrence Durrell’s libretto is wonderful, and we have singers of the highest level to carry this off, so I know it will be an extraordinary recording.

The early history of this forgotten opera is as fascinating as the story of its revival.

Glanville-Hicks initially contacted Durrell about making an operatic setting of Sappho: A Play in Verse (1950) sometime in 1960, using Diana Menuhin as an introduction.  By March 1963, the composer had in hand a commission from the San Francisco Opera, with funding for the project coming from the Ford Foundation.  Glanville-Hicks and Durrell kept in close contact throughout the development of Sappho, and in September 1963 the writer traveled to Greece in order to join the composer for direct consultation about cuts to the libretto.

During this period, Glanville-Hicks admitted discovering that she “deeply identified” with Sappho, who was, in her vision,

an aging, tragic, rich, successful, famous lady who, mystic at heart has never found fulfillment despite having had everything. She is in turn tempestuous, querulous, compassionate, tender, fierce, impatient, swinging fast from one mood to another, poised like a needle in a compass.

By October 1963, Glanville-Hicks felt confident enough to send a postcard to Durrell announcing the completion of her musical setting of his lyrics:

Dear Larry–

Sappho has sung her last aria — the curtain is down and the house lights are up!  Seven months and eleven days — a record!  I rather think that the last act is gorgeous.

Sometime later, Glanville-Hicks made the following character-sketch of her new-found friend, Larry Durrell:

He’s a mad Irishman who’s never set foot in Ireland[. . . .]  He’s a short, stocky little man who (every time he goes swimming) prays softly into the waves, “Oh god please make me thin again” — who was born in India, gives fabulous impersonations of the Babu, the Anglo-Indian, or the Greek having an argument (his Greek is fabulous) he perhaps could have been a great actor[. . . .]  He’s better than his books.  I felt I’d found a new real friend, and that happens less and less, I find.

A 1963 photo-shoot of Durrell and Glanville-Hicks evidences their mutual delight while working on the Sappho project.

Durrell 2012 extends its warmest appreciation to Jennifer Condon and Owls Nest Opera for their work to revive the Sappho opera.  We look forward to collaborating with Ms. Condon and Owls Nest Opera throughout 2012 — the centenary year of Peggy Glanville-Hicks and Lawrence Durrell.

Read the Sydney Morning Herald’s feature on Jennifer Condon, Nine-Year Quest Fueled by Love for Lost Opera.

Read Sounds Like Sydney’s conversation with Jennifer Condon, When The Goat’s Bell Rang For Sappho.

Visit the official site of Sappho: Opera in Three Acts.

Join Sappho: The Opera and Durrell 2012 on Facebook.

Donate to the Sappho Recording Appeal.

Download the “Final Monologue” from Sappho: Opera in Three Acts, sung by Australian soprano Deborah Riedel.

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10 August 2011

“I Wanted to Write a Quartet”: Joanna Kavenna Gives a Nod to Lawrence Durrell (1 August 2011).

In The Birth of Love (Faber 2010), Joanna Kavenna sought to fashion a novel in which reality was “entirely inflected by the altered concerns of a woman who is in labour.”

That ideal demanded the discovery of a storytelling form capable of conveying the immediacy and irreality 0f the birth experience.  In the resulting book, Kavenna offers her readers a dazzling “quartet” — “four narratives, four fragments of experience” — “a gory apotheosis” in which “past, present, future, fantasy and reality have merged.”

When asked by The Literateur to elaborate upon her book’s distinctive admixture of realism, science fiction, and fantasy, Kavenna cited her interest in a particular tradition of highly ironic and experimental novel, acknowledging Lawrence Durrell’s The Alexandria Quartet as one of her prime points of reference.

In terms of structure, I was responding to the postmodern tradition of fragmentation.  I suppose some writers who find they resist standard literary realism veer immediately or naturally into postmodernism, so it’s a tradition that’s always interested me.  For this book I was particularly interested in works such as Lawrence Durrell’s The Alexandria Quartet and Italo Calvino’s If on A Winter’s Night a Traveller as well as the bestselling novel it inspired, David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas, and also as you mention Michael Cunningham’s The Hours.  And of course the modernist tradition before this, Eliot’s The Waste Land and Four Quartets and Joyce’s Ulysses and Celine’s Journey to the End of the Night and so on.  Works that are highly structured, while often appearing not to be, and which refer to other literary works, both Ancient and Modern, using pastiche and irony and different styles of writing to try to convey something about the fragmentary, elusive nature of human experience.

So I wanted also in turn to allude to these works but also look at how labour and birth change literary form.  Firstly I knew I had to make the whole thing turn circles, because of this very vivid sense you get with birth that you are part of a grand cycle of birth and death, it’s really impossible to escape that feeling[. . . .]  And though they’re all fragments, I wanted somehow to create a sense of everything merging at the moment of birth.  I found birthing my own children such a moment of gory apotheosis, as if everything comes together at the point at which a new life begins:  family history, the lives of ancestors, the coincidences that cause two people to meet and birth a child, reality, fantasy, dream and everyday life.  So I wanted to write a quartet in which there are four narratives, four fragments of experience, and they all come together around this climactic moment when Brigid births her child.

Kavenna gives additional nods to Lawrence Durrell and The Alexandria Quartet in a fascinating interview published at Valerie O’Riordan’s WordPress blog, Bookmunch:

Valerie O’Riordan (VO): I noticed shades of Margaret Atwood’s Handmaid’s Tale in those sci-fi sections.  The interlinking narratives also brought to mind David Mitchell, Michael Cunningham and Matthew Kneale.  Did you have anything in mind as conscious influences on your work?  And aside from direct debts (if any), which writers are favourites of yours?

Joanna Kavenna (JK): Yes, there are lots of writers who were important for this book.  I was influenced by the modernist/postmodern tradition, as above, and felt I was writing within it at times and against it at others.  So my book was definitely a response to the work of many writers in that tradition, particularly I think Eliot, Joyce, Lawrence Durrell, Italo Calvino, Borges, Russell Hoban, Michael Cunningham and David Mitchell. Further writers who always influence/inspire me are:  Mark Twain, Charlotte Bronte, Knut Hamsun, Celine, Robert Musil, Albert Camus, Thomas Mann, Joseph Campbell, Margaret Atwood, Angela Carter, Iain Sinclair, Geoff Dyer, Philip K. Dick, etc., etc.

* * * * *

JK: I also thought it would have to make use of a fragmentary form.  I felt entirely fragmented the whole time I was writing The Birth Of Love – I wrote with babies sleeping on my lap, as they stirred and twitched, as I said ‘ssshhh’ and stroked them asleep again, trying to finish a sentence, a chapter, before they awoke. . . .  There was something incredibly moving about writing while holding a child I had birthed. And yet it also fragmented my work.  I thought, and wrote, in fragments.

At first I thought, this looks like a ‘things fall apart’ type thing.  I would have to use the traditional forms of the modernist/postmodern genre, I thought. (I think of the postmodern fragmented narrative as a genre, like detective fiction, or the bildungsroman.)  Pound, Eliot, and Joyce.  Beckett alluding to Joyce.  Lawrence Durrell, The Alexandria Quartet.  Orts, shards and fragments, as Woolf puts it in Between The Acts.  Michael Cunningham alluding to Woolf in The Hours.  Then Italo Calvino.  Then Russell Hoban.  Then David Mitchell alluding to Italo Calvino and Russell Hoban.  A long line of writers overlapping and alluding to each other.

Orts shards and fragments – I felt that was an accurate enough description of my mental processes at the time.

Joanna Kavenna currently holds the position of Writer-in-Residence at St. Peter’s College, University of Oxford.

Kavenna’s first book, The Ice Museum: In Search of the Lost Land of Thule (Penguin 2005), recounts her experience while searching for “the Atlantis of the Arctic,” the mythical land of Ultima Thule.  The Ice Museum garnered a string of award nominations, including the Guardian First Book Award, the Ondaatje Prize, and the Dolman Best Travel Book Award.  Kavenna won the 2008 Orange Broadband Award for New Writer for her first published novel, Inglorious (Faber 2007).

Read the full interview with Joanna Kavenna at The Literateur.

Read the full interview with Joanna Kavenna at Bookmunch.

Listen to Joanna Kavenna discussing her appreciation of Lawrence Durrell on BBC3 Night Waves.

Listen to an audio file of Joanna Kavenna reading from The Birth of Love at The Guardian.

Visit Joanna Kavenna’s author site.

View Joanna Kavenna’s author page at Faber and Faber.

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28 June 2011

“The Room Seems to Have Come into Its Own at Last”: One Afternoon in the Library of Patrick Leigh Fermor (11 June 2011).

Maggie Rainey-Smith has been kind enough to share images and memories from her 7 November 2007 visit with the late Patrick Leigh Fermor.

In a recent post at “A Curious Half Hour,” Maggie has published a set of photographs and video-clips from her visit at Kardamyli, giving her readers a fine sense of Paddy’s chosen place of residence, the much-beloved house which he designed and completed in collaboration with his wife, Joan Leigh Fermor.

Maggie’s pictures show us images of the home’s grey-green stone floors, laid out with slate cut from the quarry at Mount Pelion; its hand-crafted wooden ceiling (“thirty slim beams divide the ceiling up into an infinity of squares,” in the architect’s own words); and its fine view out on to the sea from the terrace garden.

Since these photos also capture Paddy entertaining visitors on the feast of Saint Michael — his name-day — they ably convey the pleasure that the writer took in sharing his lovely home with friends, neighbors, and honored guests.

In one particular shot, Maggie captures a bit of the overlook from the terrace area at Kardamyli.

The greenscape of mature olives, cedar, and rosemary work together with the mosaic inlays and the sturdy materials of the stone benches, setting the Bay of Messenia within an intimate, personalized frame.  The view in this photograph immediately calls to mind Paddy’s recollections about how he and Joan first surveyed the rough-hewn, elemental beauty of their home-site.

Our headland jutted between a bay and a small cove and there was nothing on it but olive terraces, thistles, asphodels, and an occasional tortoise and here we pitched our tent exactly where the chief room was to be.  There was rock for building everywhere. . . .

– Patrick Leigh Fermor, “Sash Windows Opening on the Foam” (1986)

This must be the very view taken in by the couple as they sat out the afternoon heat in their tents, hunched over weathered volumes of Vitruvius and Palladio in a quest for “decent proportions.”

Special appreciation also must be given to Maggie for the way in which she offers her readers privileged glimpses into the high-ceilinged, book-lined dining room at Kardamyli.

This photo takes us into the legendary heart of the house — the “chief room,” as Paddy christened it.

‘Where a man’s Eleventh Edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica is, there shall his heart be also’; and, of course, Lemprière, Fowler, Brewer, Liddell and Scott, Dr Smith, Harrap and Larousse and a battery of atlases, bibles, concordances, Loeb classics, Pléiade editions, Oxford Companions and Cambridge histories;  anthologies and books on painting, sculpture, architecture, birds, beasts, fishes, trees and stars; for if one is settling in the wilds, a dozen reference shelves is the minimum;  and they must be near the dinner table where arguments spring up which have to be settled then or never.  This being so, two roles for the chief room in a still unbuilt house were clear from the start.

– Patrick Leigh Fermor, “Sash Windows Opening on the Foam” (1986)

Immediately beyond the battle-scarred (and much-toasted!) dinner table, we can find Paddy’s electric typewriter sitting in the corner.

Just behind the typewriting stand, Paddy’s bookcases rise nine feet from the floor.

Disappointingly, Paddy’s trusty Chinese step-ladder seems to be nowhere in sight.

An elephant pole of brass-bound teak made by the Hong Kong Chinese to help minor rajahs climb into their howdahs; it splits down the middle and half the pole drops away parallel with a heartening bang like grounded arms; the rungs, slotted and hinged in hidden grooves, fall horizontal and up one goes.

– Patrick Leigh Fermor, “Sash Windows Opening on the Foam” (1986)

The names and titles on the spines of these books evidence the writers and works which Paddy found most necessary to keep close at hand after he elected to “settle in the wilds.”

Reading-copies of Freya Stark, Gerald Brenan, Norman Douglas, and Henry James nudge familiarly up against a set of Macaulay’s lectures and Doughty’s Travels in Arabia Deserta — with the latter work appearing in two mismatched, much-loved volumes.  Runciman’s histories and Churchill’s The Second World War also stand at the ready.   Over to the typewriter’s right, near-complete runs of Evelyn Waugh and Aldous Huxley share out the measure of two shelves.

But Durrell 2012 readers owe Maggie special thanks for her photograph of the lower shelf sitting immediately in front of Paddy’s typewriter.

Attentive viewers will quickly pick out a copy of Gerald Durrell’s My Family and Other Animals.

Close by comes a representative sampling of titles by the writer Paddy affectionately referred to in his letters as “my old pal Larry Durrell.”  Faber printings of Mountolive, Tunc, Reflections on a Marine Venus, Clea, Justine, and Balthazar are all clearly visible, if a trifle rummaged.

Durrell 2012 extends its gratitude to Maggie Rainey-Smith for sharing these memories, photographs, and videos.   Maggie’s words and images call back to us something of the best of the man’s spirit, and we recall his own words of praise for this beloved, well-built, and well-lived room while we pore over these scenes from a time that now seems gone.

But the great advantage of a long room is that different things can go on without impinging: reading, music, letter-writing, talk by the fire, eyelids closing in the hayáti, ‘a wildcat snooze’: or chess at one end of the room and friends’ children on the floor with tiddlywinks at the other.  Every seventh of November, which is the Feast of SS. Michael and Gabriel — and also my name-day (Mihali, in Greek) — the room fills a special role.  The Archangels have a minute chapel three groves away and after the yearly Mass, a swarm of friends from the village, sometimes fifty or sixty, come in for a long chat and drinks and mézé .  Thanks to the divans — suddenly packed with venerable figures in black coifs — the room can hold them all without too much of a squash in the middle for dancing; and when, later on, the complicated steps of the syrtos and kalamantiano, accompanied by clapping and singing, begin to weave their nimble circles round the central star, the room seems to have come into its own at last.

– Patrick Leigh Fermor, “Sash Windows Opening on the Foam” (1986)

Learn more about Maggie Rainey-Smith’s writing at her author page.

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22 June 2011

“A Set of Love Songs to the City”: Composer Lisa Bielawa Reflects on The Alexandria Quartet (15 June 2011).

In her recent New York Times Opinionator essay, composer Lisa Bielawa reflects on how Lawrence Durrell’s writing helped to shape her ambitious “site-specific musical work,” Chance Encounter (2007):

Musical experiences that heighten a sense of a place can actually break through to that region of perception that transcends individual identity.  Lawrence Durrell, whose views on the primacy of place in human experience were focused on his beloved city Alexandria, wrote in the novel Balthazar:  “I see all of us not as men and women any longer, identities swollen with their acts of forgetfulness, follies, and deceits — but as beings unconsciously made part of place, buried to the waist among the ruins of a single city. . . .”  I was reading Durrell’s Alexandria Quartet while composing Chance Encounter, and I was celebrating 15 years, and 14 apartments (in 4 boroughs!) as a New Yorker.  He helped me realize that I was writing a set of love songs to the city where I had spent my entire adult life, the city that shaped my ideals concerning the interface between music and people. Durrell encouraged me to look around me, see where I am, and write exactly from there.

Read the entirety of Lisa Bielawa’s essay, “In Berlin, Moved by Music, Place and Memory,” here.

Bielawa’s website offers readers access to her biography, along with full descriptions and video clips for her compositions Chance Encounter and Tempelhof Broadcast (premiering September 2012).

Chance Encounter has been recorded by The Knights and Susan Narucki for Orange Mountain Music (December 2010).  Listen to the full production of Chance Encounter and purchase your own copy at Rhapsody.

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18 June 2011

“This Trilogy Reflects My Reading of Him”: Amitav Ghosh Talks about Lawrence Durrell (17 June 2011).

The current issue of the business e-paper livemint.com features a conversation in which the writer Amitav Ghosh discusses the influences behind River of Smoke (John Murray, 2011), the second installment of his critically-acclaimed Ibis Trilogy.

When the interviewer asks Ghosh about his earliest reading, the novelist acknowledges an important literary debt:

I’ve been a voracious reader — and I’ve been greatly influenced by Gabriel García Márquez, James Boswell, and so many others — but it’s interesting you ask what I was reading in my 20s.  For one, Lawrence Durrell, who wrote The Alexandria Quartet.   I love those books.  And now that I think of it, this trilogy reflects my reading of him.  Each book is a different book, yet they play off each other.

The first work in Ghosh’s Ibis Trilogy — Sea of Poppies (John Murray, 2008) — was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize.

After being asked by The Hindu (20 June 2011) to elaborate upon the discontinuous relationship between Sea of Poppies and River of Smoke, Ghosh responds by turning once again to Durrell’s writing for a precedent:

Yes, absolutely.  Although these books are part of a trilogy, it is not a continuation.  Then I would be writing the same book, and I don’t want to be writing the same book all the time.  I never thought of it as a linear series.  What I had in mind was something like The Alexandria Quartet.  Although the books are linked thematically, the relationship is much less direct.

Almost two weeks later, Ghosh gives The Hindu (2 July 2011) further thoughts about The Ibis Trilogy‘s debts to The Alexandria Quartet:

“Though River of Smoke is billed as book two of The Ibis Trilogy . . . each of these was intended to be read as a book in its own right,” said author Amitav Ghosh, introducing his new book at its Delhi launch here on Friday.

The book, published by Penguin Books, is a sequel to the author’s best-selling Sea of Poppies. The author unwrapped a copy of the book, sharing the dais with author and essayist Mukul Kesavan.

Talking about River of Smoke, Mr. Ghosh said he was inspired by The Alexandria Quartet written by British writer Lawrence Durrell, because each of the four books of the tetralogy had a “tangential relationship with the other.”

Ghosh follows up on his ideas about the Art of the Tangential in an interview with Sify:

I never intended for these to be continuations — even in structure, or anything. You know, I was really thinking more along the lines of Lawrence Durrell’s Alexandria Quartet, where the books have a tangential relationship with each other, and so each of them will have its own form, its own characters, its own logic, and I think you can start anywhere.

When they’re all done, each of them will be a book in its own right, and they can be picked up and read, and then you could go back to the other books.

And here we find the interviewer at rediff.com picking up and running off with the previous queries about a connection between the works of Amitav Ghosh and Lawrence Durrell.

You mentioned recently that the books are not linked in a linear manner but thematically, like Lawrence Durrell’s Alexandria Quartet. What did you mean by that?

I don’t want (the books) to be a series of episodes connected in a direct way — not like, say, Star Wars.  Each of these books is a novel in its own right.   Even though Sea Of Poppies is the first, I don’t think it should necessarily be the first to be read.  And the way it is played out with River Of Smoke, it’s leading many new readers to Sea Of Poppies.

The jacket blurb of River of Smoke describes the second novel in the trilogy as follows:

In September 1838 a storm blows up on the Indian Ocean and the Ibis, a ship carrying a consignment of convicts and indentured laborers from Calcutta to Mauritius, is caught up in the whirlwind. When the seas settle, five men have disappeared — two lascars, two convicts and one of the passengers. Did the same storm upend the fortunes of those aboard the Anahita, an opium carrier heading towards Canton? And what fate befell those aboard the Redruth, a sturdy two-masted brig heading East out of Cornwall? Was it the storm that altered their course or were the destinies of these passengers at the mercy of even more powerful forces?

On the grand scale of an historical epic, River of Smoke follows its storm-tossed characters to the crowded harbors of China. There, despite efforts of the emperor to stop them, ships from Europe and India exchange their cargoes of opium for boxes tea, silk, porcelain and silver. Among them are Bahram Modi, a wealthy Parsi opium merchant out of Bombay, his estranged half-Chinese son Ah Fatt, the orphaned Paulette and a motley collection of others whose pursuit of romance, riches and a legendary rare flower have thrown together. All struggle to cope with their losses — and for some, unimaginable freedoms — in the alleys and crowded waterways of 19th century Canton.

Amitav Ghosh’s author website.

Amitav Ghosh’s WordPress blogsite.

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