The Black Book Author:Laurence Durrell Written in experimental prose with made-up language-a dictionary won't help with the meaning of "lerve", one of Durrell's many variations on "love"-the novel is set in the residential Regina Hotel, a place "crowded with ghosts", where "since Edwardian times no one has dusted this statuary, these carpets, these indestructible potted plants". The ... more »hotel's appropriately odd inhabitants include hypochondriacs, prostitutes male and female, political activists, sexual obsessives, and other human grotesques. Our narrator is Lawrence Lucifer, a school teacher, but the character at the heart of the book is "Death" Gregory, the previous occupant of Lucifer's room and the author of a diary entitled "The Black Book". Lucifer finds the diary, and it's entries fill out Lucifer's own feelings about life at the Regina.« less