The Avignon Quintet

infobox Book |
name = The Avignon Quintet
title_orig =
translator =


author = Lawrence Durrell
cover_artist =
country = Great Britain
language = English
series = The Avignon Quintet
genre = Novel
publisher = Faber & Faber (UK) & Viking (US)
release_date = 1992
media_type = Print (Hardback & Paperback)
pages = 1376 p. (Faber edition)
isbn = ISBN 0571225551 (paperback edition)
preceded_by = The Revolt of Aphrodite
followed_by = Caesar's Vast Ghost

The "Avignon Quintet" is a five-volume series of novels by British writer Lawrence Durrell, published between 1974 and 1985. The novels are openly metafictional and reflect the developments in experimental fiction following after Durrell's previous The Alexandria Quartet. The action of the novels is set before and during World War II, largely in France, Egypt, and Switzerland.

The novels range among multiple and contradictory narrators, often with each purporting to have written the others, and the thematic materials range from a feigned form of Gnosticism [cite news
last = Gifford
first = James
title = Gnosticism in Lawrence Durrell's Monsieur: New Textual Evidence for Source Materials
publisher = Agora
date = 2004-05-26
url = http://epe.lac-bac.gc.ca/100/202/300/agora/2004/v3n01/215.htm
accessdate = 2007-11-20 . ] , obsession with mortality, Nazism, and World War II to Grail Romances, metafiction, Quantum Mechanics [cite news
last = Lorenz
first = Paul
title = Quantum Mechanics and the Shape of Fiction: "Non-Locality" in the Avignon Quincunx
publisher = Weber Studies vol. 14 no. 1
date = 1997-01-01
url = http://weberstudies.weber.edu/archive/archive%20B%20Vol.%2011-16.1/Vol.%2014.1/14.1Lorenz.htm
accessdate = 2007-12-04 . ] , and sexual identity.

The five novels are::* "Monsieur" (1974):* "Livia" (1978):* "Constance" (1982):* "Sebastian" (1983):* "Quinx" (1985)

Durrell often referred to the work as a "quincunx", and the books were only collected together overtly as "The Avignon Quintet" in 1992, two years after Durrell's death in 1990. The notion of the quincunx challenges any linear approach to the novels, which is reflected in their stylistic features. The character Livia may be modeled in part on Unity Mitford, a prominent supporter of fascism and friend of Adolf Hitler.

References