Animating Places: Reading Fiona Sampson's Limestone Country beneath a Durrellian lens

Introductions

Fiona Sampson's Limestone Country (Little Toller Books, 2017) proves to be a riveting tour de force. While being, ostensibly, a work that speaks to and of and through the ‘spirit of place’, it manages in a manner to reinvent a genre or genres. Part memoir, part travel guide, part intimate diary, part dramatic novelistic narrative, part extended meditation and part exuberant celebration of different ‘limestone countries’ – the writing here eludes hammer- like naming. It is as various and as variegated as experience itself, without ever losing coherence and the unities that make any work of configuration poignant, redolent and susceptible to being a kind of education for the reader. And that tutelage as it turns out in this work is factual, sensual, technical and philosophical, among other kinds of teacherliness. Sampson herself calls it a kind of ‘attention’ that ‘is patient and detailed. It's a kind of “slow knowledge” that is the opposite of generalization’.

Equally, in his ‘Introduction’ to his (very late) book on Provence, Lawrence Durrell writes, as elsewhere, that ‘thanks to them’ – the dramatis personae who happened to precipitate then came to inhabit his narrative:

Or: if ‘Provence is not really a place!’ for Durrell, and if it is ‘paradoxical’, it is ‘because of the overlay of different cultures which are slowly conforming to the genius of the place, but at different speeds’. Just so, life in Sampson's ‘limestone countries’, is ‘messy with overlaps and repetitions: which’ she ‘has simplified’. Indeed, it was ‘a shock, and an epiphany, to realise that they were all made from – and in and on – limestone. Surely, I thought, this has to be more than mere coincidence. Limestone’, she continues, ‘has a special relationship with water, by which it's shaped at every stage of existence’. Hence, we must suppose the supple fluency of ‘overlaps’ but not repetitions, of dove-tailings and analogies between her four ‘limestone countries’. But to return to Durrell's Provence. […]