Following in the footsteps of D. H. Lawrence and James Joyce, Lawrence Durrell explores in his novels the quintessential concerns of the twentieth century: space, time, consciousness, sexuality, and identity. Equally at home in all the genres of literature, he strikes out in fiction to continue the structural experiments and investigations of the literary generation which preceded him, while at the same time producing a body of work which is lusty, vital, and affective. Durrell is a writer, a philosopher, and an experiencer who scorns the sterility of contemporary existence, which he has called "the English death." He is concerned with the inner spaces of the psyche, with the few levels of the human being's encounter with another which he can call valuable, and with the realities of physical experience. Without doubt a maverick within the artistic establishment, Durrell is at the same time a paradox: an exile...