Books like Haunts of the Black Masseur: The Swimmer as Hero

Not the singular and esoteric one-off classic I was expecting. Mostly anecdotes and bookchat. I wish he’d kept up the tone of this early passage:For some years we lived in Benghazi, not far from the old Greek city of Cyrene. We spent every Christmas among its ruins, the only guests of a ghost of a hotel among fir trees. On Christmas Day we made a ritual of bathing in a natural rock pool, long and rectangular, its sides encrusted with mollusces and anemones, where once Cleopatra and the Romans reputedly swam. The waves broke against one end, and beyond them, beneath the surface, lay most of the remains of the classical city. When we dipped our masked faces into the water there emerged on the corrugated sand mysterious traces of the outline of ancient streets and colonnades, their sanctity disturbed by the regular intrusion of giant rays that flapped their wings somnolently among the broken columns as they drifted in from out of the shadowy gloom of deeper water. Fragments of sculpture, bases of fountains became scattered around our flat, used as doorstops and bookends.