Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #392992 in Books
• Published on: 1991-12-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 4
• Binding: Paperback

Review
Series of four novels by Lawrence Durrell. The lush and sensuous tetralogy, which consists of Justine (1957), Balthazar (1958), Mountolive (1958), and Clea (1960), is set in Alexandria, Egypt, during the 1940s. Three of the books are written in the first person, Mountolive in the third. The first three volumes describe, from different viewpoints, a series of events in Alexandria before World War II; the fourth carries the story forward into the war years. The events of the narrative are mostly seen through the eyes of one L.G. Darley, who observes the interactions of his lovers, friends, and acquaintances in Alexandria. In Justine, Darley attempts to recover from and understand his recently ended affair with Justine Hosnani. Reviewing various papers and examining his memories, he reads the events of his recent past in romantic terms. Balthazar, named for Darley's friend, a doctor and mystic, reinterprets Darley's views from a philosophical and intellectual point of view. The third novel is a straightforward narrative of events, and Clea, volume four, reveals Darley healing, maturing, and becoming capable of loving Clea Montis, a painter and the woman for whom he was destined. -- The Merriam-Webster Encylopedia of Literature

Customer Reviews

Sound and scent rise from the page.
The great sweep of Durrell's quartet is almost impossible to describe. His characters and the evocation of wartime Alexandria are so perfect that you can taste the perfume on Justine's neck, hear the call from the mosques and smell the blood of camels butchered in the streets. Here are poets and prostitutes, diplomats and gun runners. There are scenes of lust and love and violence and despair. The characters mutate as the story unfolds and then convolutes upon itself again. We are as confused as the characters themselves and never find ourselves in a position where we understand events before they do. Myriad scenes tumble upon each other; a bird shoot on Lake Mareotis, the masqued ball, the strange death of Pursewarden, the dreadful death of Narouz. Across four volumes Durrell seldom puts a foot wrong and while his florid prose is not to everyone's taste, nobody can deny that this is one of the under rated classics of the twentieth century. After the grim years of the Second World War and the grey, slow grind of the 1950s, the novel must have burst upon literary Europe like a comet streaking across the sky. It is an essential book for anyone who considers themselves well-read.

A Frustrating Mix of Wonderful and Boring
This quartet is a frustrating mixture of wonderful writing and boring passages. I read it once a decade ago and a second time recently. To decide whether you'll like it, consider the following.

Structure: Durrell is writing spatially as well as sequentially. The first book, Justine, leaves gaps in the reader's knowledge to reflect the gaps in the narrator's knowledge. The second book, Balthazar, retraces the same material and fills in some of the gaps as the narrator learns more. The third book, Mountolive, tells the story in the form of a traditional novel (third person) and fills in most of the gaps. The fourth book, Clea, is set later in time; it once again leaves gaps to reflect what the narrator doesn't know. This is a fascinating approach, but to enjoy it, you must be willing to endure unanswered questions that reflect the narrator's lack of knowledge (including some, in Clea, that will never be answered).

Introspection: The characters spend a great deal of time looking within themselves, trying to understand their motives and desires. This can be interesting to those who like psychology. But the characters spend so much time introspecting that it becomes annoying. They are so self-centered, so hung up on everything they themselves do and wondering why they do it, that after a while one longs for a character who is more interested in someone else than in him/herself, more interested in action than in endless thought.

Style: Durrell is a wonderful wordsmith. Some of his sentences will stay with you for a long time. And he paints vivid word pictures of Alexandria. But that is also a problem: he paints, and paints, and paints. After a while, even readers who much prefer character-driven fiction to slam-bang potboilers will long fervently for something to happen.

Characters: If you like detailed descriptions and analyses of secondary characters, you may find characters such as Scobie enjoyable. If you don't, the extended time spent on such characters will become a tedious digression that slows down the story to a snail's pace.

Plot and philosophy: If you've spent a a fair amount of time wondering what love is, why some lovers are manipulative, why some love is destructive to the lovers, why and how people destroy their own loving affairs because they don't understand themselves and their motivations, this quartet will provide you with considerable food for thought. But if you regard love more as something to experience and feel than to analyze and interpret, if you believe that you're pretty much in control of your emotions and won't fall in love with someone who's bad for you, if you regard love as something fairly straightfoward and relatively easy to understand rather than as something highly complicated and abstruse, the lengthy reflections and ponderings of the characters will probably drive you up the wall.

Culture: World War II Alexandria is of course far different from the contemporary United States. If you like exploring different cultures and peoples, you'll like this aspect of the quartet. But if you like to identify with the characters in a novel as a way of getting into the story and better understanding yourself, you may find that these characters and locales are too different for you to do so.

Overall impact: Tbe book reads like a lesiurely and luxurious immersion in words, words, words. This can be sensuous and enticing. It can also leave the reader with the feeling of watching a craftsman put on a show that, ultimately, has little lasting impact.

There is much in the quartet to admire. But there are also serious negatives. For me, the considerable effort hasn't been justified by sufficient rewards. Which is not to say that I won't go back some day and try it for the third time.

A Broken Beauty
With its non-linear structure, sensuous prose, and cast of characters buffeted and beleaguered by love, this tetralogy is one of the masterworks of the twentieth century, and remains the finest work of literature to emerge from Alexandria.

Durrell jotted notes toward his "Alexandria novel" in the tower of the Ambron Villa, but began writing Justine, which he initially called his "Book of the Dead," in Cyprus in 1953. Soon after their arrival in Cyprus, Eve Cohen, Durrell's second wife, became depressed, then psychotic. Durrell had her confined in a hospital in Germany, and brought his mother to Cyprus to help him with Sappho, his daughter with Eve. Rising at four-thirty am, he wrote in longhand so as not to wake Sappho, before leaving to start teaching at seven. He typed out his week's work on weekends. In a letter to Henry Miller, he noted "never have I worked under such adverse conditions," but commented also: "I have never felt in better writing form."

Justine investigates its characters by laying down scenes and moments with little concern for chronology; instead, like a mosaic, the pieces link up to form a whole. This broken, cluttered style echoes the love lives of the characters, who are continually floundering within relationships: deceitful, forlorn, exhausted, cynical. Justine, the central character, is based on Eve, to whom the book is dedicated, and it is her portrait that emerges most fully, though there are no caricatures in the Quartet. The prose is miraculous, the metaphors always fresh, ideas and images crushed together to form an angular beauty.

Eve left Durrell before he had finished Justine, but he shortly thereafter met Claude Vincendon, who had grown up in Alexandria. Inspired by her love and memories, he completed Justine, and conceived the idea of a series of books "using the same people in different combinations." Balthazar is the equal of Justine in its imagery and investigation of character; of the tetralogy, these two are closest in spirit. Mountolive, more traditional in its storytelling, relates the love affair between David Mountolive, a British civil servant, and Leila, a married Copt. Clea, an homage to Claude, and dedicated to her, moves forward in time. Darley, the narrator of Justine, returns to Alexandria after the war, where he falls in love with Clea Montis, and they reminisce about their acquaintances. Less successful than the previous three in some ways, it nevertheless contains some vivid scenes, and the writing remains delicious.

Justine was an instant critical and popular success upon its publication. The Quartet cemented Durrell's reputation and made him a perennial favorite for the Nobel Prize.