Prospero's Cell: Book Analysis

“Somewhere between Calabria and Corfu the blue really begins... A peninsula nipped off while red hot and allowed to cool into an antarctica of lava…” These are two of the opening lines from Lawrence Durrell’s book “Prospero's Cell”, originally published in 1945. This is the book that made Corfu famous, as it is generally accepted. While these claims could be argued as overblown, indeed the “Girl of the Ionians” could not have found a fitter chronicler. Seductively balancing descriptive prose with historical detail brings to life the landscape and manners of the island of Corfu. Moreover it did last year an even greater service when the book turned into an ITV series which proved to be a rollicking delight for the English channel, attracting
Mots justes from Durrell, as always. That's what it's all about. Even if he offers, as criticized, splinters of the landscape, Edward Lear didn’t. Corfu was to provide him with the nearest he got to a definition of paradise, to which he responded with his whole being, giving his testimony of Corfu’s landscape that could have inspired Impressionism, with an unerring topographical precision.
Beauty is the leitmotif found in any diary, chronicle, book, story or article written by poets, painters, princesses, musicians, or artists who spent part of their lives in Corfu. And there were countless of them. Casanova also lived here, and for good reason in 1744 – 45, while Shakespeare’s spirit floats around as per Durrell’s assertions that Corfu been the inspiration for Prospero's island in his last play The Tempest, with the Bard's mythical "Sycorax" being a loose anagram of the ancient name for the island,