Word: labyrinth
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Oran, a city facing the sea but turned inward on itself like a snail, was once called "the capital of boredom." Now its 400,000 people (half European, half Moslem) were bored only with mutual slaughter. The Oran prefect was hiding at the center of a labyrinth of locked doors and guarded hallways; the entire civil administration of Algiers has fled 40 miles away to an armed camp at Rocher Noir...
...stand impersonal in stone and larger than life in the palace garden. Generally, he seems to be saying that all men and women live, or can live, more than merely personal lives, that all lives potentially contain, as these two lives contain, elements of legend -the experience of the labyrinth, a struggle between Death and the Maiden, a sleeping beauty and an awakening prince...
Author Durrell's thesis is that everyone inevitably weaves his own destiny: "We live by a very exacting kind of poetic logic-since we get exactly what we ask for, no more, and no less." But only in the threatening dark of the labyrinth does man achieve the enlightenment with which to perceive his own fate...
...Dark Labyrinth is a new old book, written when Durrell was 33, midway between his youthful Black Book, a greyish imitation of Henry Miller, and the artful arabesques of The Alexandria Quartet...
...Gibbon and Ramon Novarro to such of their descendants as might still be living." Novarro, a spry 62-year-old living in North Hollywood, is to this day perfectly able to communicate with anyone by word of mouth rather than mediums. But at the center of Durrell's Labyrinth, there lurks enough true humanity to make up for a little bit of bull...