Bitter Lemons – Inside Cyprus

I’m a great fan of the writings of Lawrence Durrell, especially when he is writing about Greece and Italy. His Bitter Lemons, about his experiences living in Cyprus, is among his best, although his account of a bus tour in Sicilian Carousel is good reading as well.

Bitter Lemons is especially interesting because of its timing. Durrell was there in the early 1950s, when Cyprus was still under British rule and before it was declared an independent state. Acutely aware of the problems that would eventually be Cyprus’s undoing – the Turkish presence there – Durrell weaves the politics, history and culture with his accounts of everyday life for himself and the islanders. But it is the book’s human insight, humor, pathos and the brilliance of its language that make it such a joy to read.

Durrell is best known for his fiction – The Alexandria Quartet set the literary world on its heels in the 1960s with a group of four books, each recounting the same series of events, but from the perspective of a different character. And it is Durrell’s ability to see inside his characters, whether he is creating them as he does in the Alexandria Quartet or meeting and living beside them as in Bitter Lemons, that bring his fiction and non-fiction so vividly to life.

Bitter Lemons is peopled by the characters he encounters in Cyprus, his friends and neighbors, Greeks, Turks and Brits, and they are the flesh and blood of the stories. Through them the reader sees the British rule of Cyprus slowly deteriorate, a sense of foreboding that is only heightened by our own knowledge of what was to lie in the island’s future.