Word: corfu
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...This theme has more or less dominated a spate of recent novels, notably The Exchange of Joy (set in Italy), The Capri Letters (Italy), A Slimmer Night (Italy) and The Sea and the Stone (Greece). In The Dark Glasses the atmospheric catalyst is the Greek resort island of Corfu, and the inhibited patient is a 39-year-old crew-cut Englishman named Patrick Orde whose eleven-year marriage to a Greek woman is not so much on the rocks as thoroughly becalmed...
Biggest Puzzle. Patrick is a kind of dilettante snowman, "detached to the point of selfishness in his chosen serenity . . . his violin-playing, his botany, his photography, his collection of Cretan ikous." Corfu thaws him out-first with a throb of color from its sapphire sea and sky, orange groves and olive trees, then with the pastoral charm of tinkling goat bells and squat white stone houses, and finally with its people, who teach him a language of the heart that is puzzlingly Greek to him. Biggest puzzle of all is his Venus de Miloesque wife Iris, who plunges into...
...tragically complicated by the fact that her brother Stavro, a boy with crypto-homosexual longings, feels he should rank first in Patrick's affections. By novel's end, Soula has died at her brother's hand. Resignedly estranged from each other, Patrick and Iris leave Corfu chewing the bitter rind of memory, all that is left of their brief repast of the juices and joys of the sensuous life...
...wouldn't quit." said the younger brother, "so I let him have it in the leg. I should have shot the captain for waking him, but it's bad to kill people." At noon, the strange party landed at the Greek island of Corfu and gave themselves up. To newsmen's questions about their escape from Communism, the soldiers would say nothing, but the captain was just as outspoken in denunciation of the Reds as the two brothers who had kidnaped him. "I'd prefer 17 thousand times to stay in this country. Greece is freedom...
...Albania he visited the Turkish vizier, Ali Pasha, who "treated me like a child, sending me almonds and sugared sherbet, fruit and sweetmeats twenty times a day." Off the isle of Corfu he found he could take the lash of fortune as well as her caress. When the ship seemed certain to go down in a storm, and even the captain "burst into tears and ran below deck," young Byron, with as much bravery as bravado, "wrapped myself up in my Albanian capote (an immense cloak) and lay down on deck to wait the worst." On shore, his valor...