by Lawrence Durrell, Kindle Version, originally published in 1957, this edition published in 2012 by Open Road Integrated Media, Inc., New York

I have always wanted to read this book as I recall my father thought very highly of it and the other three books in the Alexandria Quartet.  In addition, it appears we will be visiting Alexandria next spring on our cruise, so I thought it would be nice to get some history and flavor of the city before we go there.  Alas, I was disappointed and didn’t enjoy it very much at all.  The characters seemed to just pop up, one after the other, and I didn’t get much sense of who they were or what role they were playing in the novel.  After reading a while, I started to get some sense of what was going on, but, as soon as I did, the novel suddenly came to a halt.  It was over; the end.

Toward the end it started getting a bit interesting as some of the events that unfolded had some potential for suspense, but to no avail as the events didn’t lead to anything at all.  There was basically no plot at all in this book.

Durrell’s vocabulary must have been voluminous as there were words that I had never seen before.  Luckily, I was reading the novel on my Kindle so I could instantly look up the meaning.  I’m not sure that was very helpful, however, as once I looked it up I immediately forgot it as the word usually wasn’t used again in the book.  Also, there were several times when my Kindle dictionary didn’t even recognize the word so no definition was available.

I was glad I read the book as it gave me a sense of Durrell’s writing style which seems to have been popular at the time he wrote it.  I will not be continuing on to the other three books in the quartet, however.  I might give some of his brother, Gerry’s books a try as they seem pretty interesting.