SICILIAN CAROUSEL. (1977). Lawrence Durrell. ****.About ten years ago, my wife and I took a ten-day trip to Sicily that was much like the trip described by Durrell in this book. It was a bus tour, and stopped at essentially the same cities as the Carousel tour. As Durrell commented, ten days was hardly enough, but we enjoyed it. Durrell’s book was not a travel guide, even though it was marketed under that genre. Each site he saw gave him an opportunity to remember former events in his life and former sights that he had seen. He did soften his treatment, however, by inventing a group of fellow passengers with whom he could interact. As on our trip, the group was overawed by the archeological remnants left behind by the serial rulers of the island over the years. In Durrell’s case, his classical knowledge was tickled by many of them and he would be off on a tangent involving some obscure figure of Greek or Roman myth. Durrell was able to probe the depth of what he saw much better than I, and did reveal to me much of what I had missed during our sojourn. The legend of Saint Rosalie, the patron saint of Palermo, was told in depth – a fascinating bit of religious lore. Each stop along the way fell under Durrell’s scrutiny that went beyond the usual patter of the tour guide. In spite of that, I am glad that a person like Durrell was not my seat-mate during my trip. I’m sure that I would have snapped “Oh, shut up!” at him at several points during the tour. Knowing that this was not meant to be a tour guide does not exclude it as required reading matter before, during, and any such trip you might make. Although Durrell’s erudition bursts to the surface, the human side of him is often revealed as he used his fictional fellow passengers as sounding boards for his feelings about the country.
