Among the several ways of looking at Alexandria, one is represented by Edmund Keeley's critical book, Cavafy's Alexandria, which condemns the city as "squalid." Another approach, even less generous and far less literal, is that of Lawrence Durrell, whose notions of the city's history, politics, linguistics, ethnography and topography are permeated with unconcealed ethnic and religious hostilities. These attitudes were certainly not shared by Constantine Cavafy, who is repeatedly appealed to by Durrell in the text as a kind of authority. Crucial in Cavafy's work is acceptance of the ordinary mundane physical reality of the city, without which precisely those emotions would be absent that provide significance or meaning. The same fidelity to the world is at the center of Tsirkas' Drifting Cities. Both were writing for the kind of reader who prefers to be told something based upon sensitive observation, rather than something merely imagined. **********
