http://kaggsysbookishramblings.wordpress.com/2014/07/16/recent-reads-prosperos-c... ( )

You become aware of islands, coming to meet you.... This travel memoir dedicated to Durrell's first experience in Greece, on the island of Corfu from 1935 -1939 is a sensuous banquet of luminous impressions. Durrell’s travel memoirs are mosaics of history, landscape, folklore, diaries of daily experience filtered through an artist's eye searching for the patterns and the myth below the surface. They are not so much explorations of the soul of place per se, but of the ways the soul of place expresses itself through himself and others, physically, mentally, emotionally, sexually. On this bitter cold February day with rain lashing the window panes, I dream of an escape to an island, to a little white house above the sea, like the one where Durrell once lived.

In keeping with Durrell's interest in multifaceted realities, I suggest reading this book together with Henry Miller's The Colossus of Maroussi, about his visit to the Durrells at that time, and with Amateurs in Eden a biography of the mysterious N. by her daughter Joanna Hodgkin, who gives us her own side of the story. ( )

Mostly interesting, but got a bit dry in places - the history of Corfu doesn't interest me that much. Interesting to read straight after 'Amateurs in Eden' - a biography of Nancy Durrell, who features occasionally in Prospero's Cell as 'N'. I'd recommend Prospero's Cell for Durrell fans. ( )

The master at work and at play in Corfu in the 1930s. ( )

A marvellous and poetic evocation of Durrell's life with his first wife on the Ionian island of Kerkyra from 1937 until they were forced to leave for Alexandria by the war. The book was first published in 1945 and is a precursor of his best-known semi-autobiographical sequence of novels "The Alexandria Quartet" .The Greece of today is very different from what it was seventy years ago but anyone who has had his heart stolen by Greek landscape and character will recognise instantly those unchanged features which Durrell captured with such insight. ( )