Bitter Lemons of Cyprus

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I have never seen Pentadactylos' castles as Gothic before reading this book. In addition all the chapters that didn't have to do with the bitter struggle were the ones I loved. Buffavento, Saint Hilarion, Kantara, all these castles were built one after the other along the narrow Pentadaktylos mountains, but sadly when you search for them on Google you see them as castles in Northern Cyprus. I love reading memoirs and books on travelling, not because of “I learn new stuff about new places” nonsense, but because they help me to understand the stand of the writer; since those kind of books reveal how their writers perceive people and the world around them more readily and personally than say, a novel they design. So, when I got The Bitter Lemons of Cyprus out of a Kindle deal (I was planning to read the infamous Alexandria Quartet for a while and thought it would be nice to get the feel of Durrell’s writing beforehand), I was curious, to say the least. But then the grinding started.

Bitter Lemons of Cyprus - Listening Books Bitter Lemons of Cyprus - Listening Books

Initially my reaction as an Hellenophile is one of sadness and sorrow at the short sighted-ness of the British Government at the time. Bitter Lemons of Cyprus is Lawrence Durrell’s unique account of his time in Cyprus, during the 1950s Enosis movement for freedom of the island from British colonial rule. Winner of the Duff Cooper Memorial Prize, it is a document at once personal, poetic and subtly political – a masterly combination of travelogue, memoir and treatise. His descriptions of the Pentadaktylos mountains are eerie and romantic (with romantic I don't mean romantic as in St. Valentine's and shite like that but in the sense of aesthetic experience with feelings of awe, and apprehension while experiencing the sublimity of nature).Lodging with a friend, Panos, he can begin to get a measure of the people and culture. It is idyllic sitting on the terrace drinking wine before heading down to the harbour to watch the ‘sunset melt’. It was with this friend that he truly came to understand the meaning of the word ‘kopiaste’, or Cypriot hospitality. It was also the best way to see if he could really afford to buy a small place to live in. It would be. Lamplight, wine and good conversation sealed in the margins of the day so that one slept at night with a sense of repletion and plenitude, as if one were never more to wake. Lawrence Durrell was a British novelist, poet, dramatist, and travel writer. Born in 1912 in India to British colonial parents, he was sent to school in England and later moved to Corfu with his family - a period which his brother Gerald fictionalised in My Family and Other Animals- later filmed as ITV's The Durrells in Corfu - and which he himself described in Prospero's Cell. The first of Durrell's island books, this was followed by Reflections on a Marine Venus on Rhodes; Bitter Lemons, on Cyprus, which won the Duff Cooper Memorial Prize; and, later, The Greek Islands. Although he claims to hate politics, he takes a job as an Information Minister with the British government of Cyprus. True, it appears to have been an inopportune time, with, according to Durrell, Athens radio whipping up the stupid peasants with ideas of independence.

Bitter Lemons of Cyprus by Lawrence Durrell – review, 30/11 Bitter Lemons of Cyprus by Lawrence Durrell – review, 30/11

Commandaria - Κουμανδαρία. Cypriot wine. Sweet, quite different from all the other things you've been hearing about Cyprus lately. Lovely stuff, similar raisiny flavor profile to a PX sherry, but less syrupy and cloying--you can drink this without fear of developing type-2 diabetes. People in Bitter Lemons are always slipping off for a glass of the stuff on some terrace or another. I had to try it.Meanwhile, the colonial government dreams on, the dreamy inertia of bureaucracy, throwing away its opportunities to defuse the crisis politically by promising to hold an eventual plebiscite on the question ... at some vague future date. The government instead persists in treating the movement as merely the obsession of a few isolated hotheads -- first to be ignored and then, to be put down with force. The British underestimated Cypriots because most of them knew Cypriots as lethargic subhuman beings, and Durrell has for chapter's 11 epigraph a very racist and vile paragraph taken from W. Hepworth Dixon's book British Cyprus In that year, the British began a "war on terrorism" -- and lost the traditional affection of the people they governed -- by hanging a quiet, seemingly well behaved young man who had worked in the colonial government's tax department. It was time for Durrell to leave this warm and beautiful land; his neighbors and close friends could no longer look him in the eye.

Bitter Lemons of Cyprus by Lawrence Durrell | Waterstones

And as we walked across the carpets of flowers their slender stalks snapped and pulled around our boots as if they wished to pull us down into the Underworld from which they had sprung, nourished by the tears and wounds of the immortals." Midway through, the dark clouds begin to roll in. Enosis has turned terrorist and the British leave. Durrell must leave too as well as other friends and family. One friend is murdered, he’s saddened at the state of things but gets out long before Cyprus was divided horizontally between the Turks and the Greeks. The area Durrell lived in was captured by the Turkish government in 1974, so that means his primarily Greek Cypriot neighbors would have been abruptly forced to leave their homes and flee south. It was violent but not as bad as the partition in India approximately 25 years earlier. He writes as an artist, as well as a poet; he remembers colour and landscape and the nuances of peasant conversation . . . Eschewing politics, it says more about them than all our leading articles . . . In describing a political tragedy it often has great poetic beauty.’ Kingsley Martin, New Statesman Lose yourself in this classic prize-winning memoir of life in 1950s Cyprus on the brink of revolution by the legendary king of travel writing and real-life family member of The Durrells in Corfu. And so the rest of the book apparently goes, giving Durrell's unabashedly nationalistic sketch of the war of independence in Cyprus.

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Journeys, like artists, are born and not made. A thousand differing circumstances contribute to them, few of them willed or determined by the will—whatever we may think. They flower spontaneously out of the demands of our natures—and the best of them lead us not only outwards in space, but inwards as well. Travel can be one of the most rewarding forms of introspection.…" Durrell found a great, almost incomprehensible love for the British among Greek Cypriots, who, as did mainland Greeks, viewed the English as the people who had supported the Greek struggle for independence against the Ottomans. Greek Cypriots repeatedly assured him of this love, assured him that their struggle for Enosis in no way represented a hatred of the British. But by the end of Durrell's stay in Cyprus, in 1956, these old bonds between the two peoples were being broken -- tragically and unnecessarily broken in Durrell's opinion.