Durrell’s various Greek island books and Miller’s Colossus of Maroussi enchanted me with their marvelous descriptions of people, places and the light of Greece.  I was disappointed to have finished the last of them, Durrell’s Reflections on a Marine Venus, and therefore relieved to stumble upon Golding’s Good-bye to Ithaca which my husband bought for me in a flea-market.  It has lost the dust cover and the title on the spine has faded; I found it again only because I was looking at the shelf of books on Greece and wondered what that pale blue one was about. 

Golding did his own Odyssey, venturing in search of Troy before wending his way back to Ithaca.  Here he comments on islands appearing and disappearing as they sailed. 

All day long it was a dazzle of islands, coming up from the sea like so many Venuses with the sunlight dripping on their shoulders. 

Source: Louis Golding, Good-bye to Ithaca (London: Hutchinson, 1955), p. 130

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