Word: nunquam
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Lawrence Durrell has written a duet of novels (Tune and Nunquam) and The Alexandria Quartet. Now he is literally trying to go himself one better. Livia is a mirror image and extension of Monsieur (1975), and Durrell has promised that three more novels in this series will follow...
...NUNQUAM by Lawrence Durrell. 318 pages. E.P. Dutton...
...Irishman raised in India, Lawrence Durrell is a kind of blarney artist in swami's turban. In The Alexandria Quartet, the illusions were so masterly as to seem substance enough. In Tune, Durrell's 1968 novel, and now in its sequel, Nunquam, Durrell's virtuosity has slipped sufficiently to leave him exposed as a bit of a trickster. His hand is no longer quicker than the reader's eye, and many critics have clobbered...
...Nunquam is no Justine, but it is better than its detractors are saying. Like Novelist Frame, he too seems more concerned with what will be than what has been. Certainly, his plot is stock Brave New World. Julian, the boss of a sinister superorganization known only as "the firm," orders up a sex-goddess robot modeled after a dead movie star, lolanthe, whom he once loved. Due to circumstances that occurred in another time and another place, Julian is a eunuch, empty of everything but the desire for desire-what Durrell calls "the enormous cupidity of impotence." Once constructed, lolanthe...
Still, if one can take Nunquam as a sideshow, the minor Durrell delights are there. Who else would write, "The cinema is the No play of the Yes-Man"? And where else, in the year 1970, is there a novelist inclined to describe the aftereffects of a concussion as "darkness hanging like a Japanese print of an extinct volcano...