South Wind
A bishop arrives on a Mediterranean island to investigate the morals of its inhabitants and finds himself slowly converted to their way of living. Douglas based the island on Capri and filled the book with conversations about sex, food, religion and the uses of pleasure.
It is a talky novel, and the talk is very good. Douglas was a travel writer and a notorious figure, and the book has the ease of something written by someone who has stopped worrying about respectability. It is also more serious than its reputation: the argument is about whether pleasure can be a philosophy.
Public-domain status
First published in 1917. In the United States, works published before 1930 are in the public domain. In the European Union the general term is the life of the author plus 70 years; Norman Douglas died in 1952, so this work has been free to republish there since 2023.
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