Lawrence le magnifique. Essai sur Lawrence Durrell et le roman relativiste

First edition, of which no deluxe copies were printed.
Handsome copy.
Autograph inscription signed by Lawrence Durrell to his close friend Janine Brun.

After many years spent in Greece, Egypt and Rhodes, the travel writer Lawrence Durrell was forced to flee Cyprus following popular uprisings that led the island to its independence from the British crown. Rich only in a shirt and a typewriter but crowned with the success of his novel Bitter Lemons of Cyprus (Les citrons acides), he arrived in France in 1956 and settled in the Languedoc village of Sommières. In the "Tartès house," his large dwelling surrounded by trees, he wrote the second part of his work, his monumental Avignon Quintet, devoted himself to painting and received his illustrious friends, including the couple Henry Miller and Anaïs Nin, violinist Yehudi Menuhin, London publisher Alan G. Thomas, and his two daughters Penelope and Sappho.
Among the olive trees and under the Mediterranean sun, in the mid-1960s he met the young and sparkling "Jany" (Janine Brun), a woman from Montpellier in her thirties with devastating beauty, who worked in the Antiquities department of the Sorbonne in Paris. She was nicknamed "Buttons" in memory of their first meeting, where the young woman wore a dress covered with buttons. Henry Miller also fell under the charm of "Buttons," praising her beauty and eternal youth in exceptional unpublished letters. The three companions spent memorable Parisian evenings of which we keep precious autograph traces through their epistolary exchanges. Recommended by Durrell, she made numerous trips notably to England from where she received vast correspondence from the writer as well as original artworks signed with his artist pseudonym, Oscar Epfs.