That’s what this article claims.

I didn’t realize that 2012 was the centenary of Durrell’s birth, but I will certainly honor it. He was a big influence on me for a while, but I have trouble see him as being anything but very much tied to his time, partly because he will always be linked in my mind with Henry Miller. But also, his experimentalism seems very much of a time with his contemporaries. And the ‘globalism’ of his Alexandria was the globalism of the Mediterranean, which had always been multinational because of the relative ease of sailing its calm (compared to the nearby Atlantic) waters. It was global when Alexandria still had its library.