Book reviews

Abstract

On 29 April 1933 Cavafy died in Alexandria, the city in which he was born. There is some reason for satisfaction in this. Visitors to his apartment on the second floor of 10 Rue Lepsius knew how self-contained Cavafy's small and familiar world in Alexandria was. Rue Lepsius was home for the last twenty-six years of Cavafy's life: ‘Below, the brothel caters for the flesh. And there is the church St. Savvas's] which forgives sin. And there is the hospital where we die.’ The first floor of 10 Rue Lepsius never catered to Cavafy's flesh, but the church forgave his sins, and he died in the hospital. He could have died in an hospital in Athens where he had gone the year before for treatment of cancer of the throat. He stayed there for a time at the Hûtel Cosmopolite, and from Kifissiá he found the sight of Hymettos and the mountains to the north ‘boring’. He returned home to die, ‘an Alexandrian of the Alexandrians’, an epitaph he very nearly composed for himself.