NONFICTION - Jan. 13, 1991

CAESAR’S VAST GHOST by Lawrence Durrell (Arcade Publishing/Little, Brown: $35; 204 pp.) . An appreciation and history of Provence, this informed personal vision opens with a color plate of the author’s home there, a pale, quiet two-story building behind a row of sunlit trees. This region of Southern France is both French and Italian, and with poems, historical references, personal notes and the idiosyncratic observations of two friends, Durrell tells of the generations of settlers who have left an imprint here. The three dozen photographs by Harry Peccinotti are exquisite, fragile glimpses, beautifully produced. A two-page photo of the coastline near Cassis, the sea as purple as black currants, keeps beckoning the reader back, again and again; it is a feat to have found pictures to stand up to the words.