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Search - Losing Alexandria

Losing Alexandria
Author: Victoria Thompson

(First published 1998 in Picador by Pan Macmillan Australia. Went into a second printing straightaway and was a literary success being on the Melbourne Age best seller list for several weeks). — They all fell in love with Alexandria. They fell for the strange and evocative city, the romantic cit... more »y, the sensual city, the city of mystery, of secret seductions, of riddles, of silences and of irresistible decadence. Alexandria the mistress you can never forget.

Losing Alexandria evokes the world of Alexandria, Egypt the way it once was, in this elegant mixture of memoir, history and personal reflection. In this memoir Victoria Thompson vividly recalls the romance and mystique of living in Alexandria when Egypt was a British Protectorate (as in The English Patient), and many of the figures who lived in this famous city: Alexander, Cleopatra, Caesar, Mark Antony. author E.M. Forster and the poet Cavafy. Lawrence Durrell’s Alexandria Quartet served as one of the major inspirations of the book. “He helped me lift the veil on things glimpsed and half understood in my childhood, and encouraged me to push aside the boundaries and step into forbidden territory.” Although she paints a romantic image of Alexandria, a place where writers found inspiration, soldiers broke from war, and exotic groups of people congregated, she also writes about the dark side of sex, the alleys and child brothels. She confronts Cavafy and Durrell in a couple of surprising, imagined scenes.

The book shifts in time and place between Alexandria and Australia, offering colourful and interesting juxtapositions. For instance, Victoria attended a British convent run by Irish nuns in Alexandria, a stark contrast to the bush school she found herself attending in Australia. But her life journey did not end with exile. She writes of her eventful life as an actress, then psychotherapist, coming close to dying in the Himalayas, attending film festivals in Cannes and Venice with her film maker husband (and nearly dying in Venice), staying in Savannah, Georgia, with her film actor brother-in-law filming with Clint Eastwood, and discovering a tragic love story between a close relative and a young soldier-poet, when she visits a cousin in Gloucestershire, England.

ISBN-13: 9781425175641
ISBN-10: 1425175643
Publication Date: 12/8/2008
Pages: 276
Rating:

0 stars, based on 0 rating

Publisher: Trafford Publishing
Book Type: Paperback
Members Wishing: 3
Reviews: Amazon | Write a Review

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