“The Revolt of Aphrodite” is a two-volume work by one of the most famous British writers of the 20th century—the older brother of Gerald Durrell, a friend of Henry Miller, the author of the famous “Alexandrian Quartet” and “Avignon Quintet,” and a modernist and postmodernist all in one. “The Revolt of Aphrodite” is something like “Secret Files” for intellectuals, full of all sorts of exotic things, motifs of mirror images and doubles, grotesque characters, and a great deal of love, along with incomparable Durrell aphorisms.
This book is conceived as the first novel of the two-volume series. Careful readers will notice strange echoes of the “Alexandrian Quartet” and even “The Black Book” appearing somewhere in the text; these are not self-repetitions—they are done on purpose.