Word: nessim
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Stockholm a much more impressive haul from China sat in a customs shed. It was a treasure hoard picked up in Peking by Nils Nessim, 43, a Swedish carpet dealer and importer. On a previous trip to Red China last year he had bought only modern carpets, ivory and porcelain. This time, taken down winding Peking streets to out-of-the-way antique shops, Nessim said he had stumbled onto a marvelous bronze figure of a six-armed, three-faced god crowned with a headdress of flames, excitedly asked if he might buy it. Told that he might, Nessim realized...
...Nessim insists that he got his collection out through some bureaucratic error, but his Chinese export permit looked official enough. Presumably the Chinese Reds agreed to sell some of the family heirlooms simply because they needed the money for foreign exchange...
...powerful thrust of politics. Many of the riddles posed in the earlier books get new answers. Pursewarden kills himself not from spiritual torpor but in expiation of a political blunder. Justine's fevered racing from bed to bed is shown to be patriotism, not nymphomania, for she and Nessim are smuggling arms into Palestine. Nessim believes that only the creation of a strong Jewish state will save the isolated minorities of the Middle East-Copts, Greeks, Armenians, Jews-from "being gradually engulfed by the Arab tide...
...this is the weakest of the three novels, both because Mountolive himself is basically an uninteresting man and because the introduction of politics as the theme makes puppets of Justine, Nessim and Pursewarden. As in all political life, there is the effect of contrivance rather than spontaneity, of truckling to slogans rather than living by inner compulsions...
...Author Durrell's weaknesses would still be strengths in most other novelists, and readers of Mountolive will be sharply aware that they are encountering an acute intelligence pursuing a grand design. The book ends with a rise of tension as Nessim's brother, a naive savage armed with a bullwhip and a Messianic impulse, is brutally slain. Faithful to his belief that "truth is what most contradicts itself," Author Durrell fails to be explicit about the murderer. It may be Nessim, Justine, or even agents of King Farouk's lethargic government. Presumably, this cliffhanger conclusion will...