This quartet of novels relates the meanderings, musings and couplings of several British expatriates and Egyptian natives in the Alexandria of the 40's.  Like most such novels, they are all mood & sensuality, with little plot and no point.  Expatriates--Hemingway, Miller, the Fitzgerald of Tender is the Night, etc.--have produced some of the most overrated literature in modern memory and many of the worst novels on this List.  It is often said that most great Art is about the search for identity.  But to be considered great Art, it should help us discover something about our own identities; it should be universal.  Durrell, one of "the apostles of sex", has written a monument to his own identity and it elicits just one response: Who the hell cares?

(Reviewed:)

Grade: (F) Orrin C. Judd

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