Customer Reviews

The Alexandria Quartet Boxed Set

5 star:		(53)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(6)

 

 

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.

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.

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.

I have now read and re-read the Alexandria Quartet and there's little doubt that it ranks up there with the very best - it's scope, ranging from being an exploration of the human 'emotional' condition through politics and philosophy to being a 'cracking yarn', is comparable to that of Tolstoy.

In my opinion it matters little in which order the Quartet is read - confirmation of Durrell's success at attempting a literary equivalent of the 'theory of relativity' - but as Justine (the 1st book..) is a beautifully written emotional outpouring (from the standpoint of an Anglo-Saxon who, upon landing in Alexandria, has just discovered unbuttoned love...), containing little in the way of plot signposts, it demands perseverance...here's my advice (for what it's worth): if you feel the need to orientate yourself in the story read Mountolive 1st, everything flows thereafter.

Does the fact that this Quartet needs something of a roadmap make it a flawed book? I think not, it should be seen, instead, as a measure of the satisfying, if complex, story Durrell tells.

This book is about pre-WWII Alexandria with its promenades, palms swinging in the wind, colonial palaces and dark, smelly, narrow passages of the old kasbah; it is about delicate relationship between the Alexandrian expat community (writers, diplomats, soldiers, hangers on, ne'er do wells) and the native Egyptians, Copts and Jews. Like in today's New York, these people love and hate and yearn in blatant disregard of unwritten rules of conduct that separate the rulers and the ruled in the post-colonial world. i simply love the delicateness with which Durrell writes about passion, about the unfolding of the senses, creative inspiration and about the soul. i love the humour that seeps through the pages and the uncanny way he captures the personalities of his protagonists. The people in this tetralogy have become my friends - Scobie, Clea, Nessim, Melissa, Darley, Pombal, Pursewarden ... have taught me about living (and about dying). In many ways, the tetralogy is very unpretentious - it is about ordinary lives of Alexandrians just before WWII. But how very extraordinary is the ordinary. How beautiful is the gradual unfolding of Darley's own character from the clutches of passion and lust and into the embrace of love. These books are about giving and taking, about the mundane and the sacred, sweet and sour of life. And they are about nostalgia and yearning which take refuge in an open heart. I recommend them highly.

Yes, I thoroughly agree that this is a well-penned novel exploring what Durrell calls "modern love". It is also, perhaps above all, a beautiful, harrowing description of a love for a place and time, prewar and immediate postwar Alexandria. My primary problem with the work lies in the author's stated intent in composing this work, as stated in the Introductory Note to Balthazar, epitomised in one sentence: "This in not Proustian or Joycean method-for they illustrate Bergsonian "Duration" in my opinion, not 'Space-Time'."--Whatever can he mean? I asked myself when first reading this asseveration. Now, having completed my reading, I ask myself if it means anything at all, this putative appropriation of Einsteinian science to literature.

For this novel is nothing if not Proustian--Indeed, many of the introspective digressions are almost verbatim quotes from Proust. I don't see how Joyce enters into the picture at all. This is so clearly a work infused with French and expat French culture intermingling with English and Arabic, that its affiliation with Proust is even more accentuated. Furthermore, Joyce was never influenced by the Bergsonian notion of "Duration." And, though many who write about Proust contend that he was so influenced-He certainly read Bergson, anyway.-the connexion seems very tenuous to me, having read them both myself.

There are a few other problems. At times, this work seems like a pastiche of other works. The Dickensian-named Pusewarden, for instance, is so obviously, in his style and his philosophy a pale copy of the Doctor from Djuna Barnes's "Watchman, What of the Night!" chapter of her brilliant book, Nightwood, that it's almost embarrassing to read his declamations. Of course, he lets his real poetic genius be known to Darley in those letters, subsequently burned. But we never get to read them!

If Durrell's purpose was to usurp Proust's place as the authority on the prismatic, shape-shifting character of love, modern or otherwise, then he has signally failed. All one has to do is read Proust to see this.

If, on the other hand, his ambition was to create a delicious, brilliantly wrought and worded, portait of a certain time and place and a depiction of the ever-elusive qualities of the lives and loves therein, he has smashingly succeeded. Thus, all quibbles aside, it's well worth the read.

This set calls out for a personal response: I found Justine by 'accident' in a house we rented in Tuscany.

It is a novel that enthralls you, never letting you go. Very few novelists can write about love as the object itself - or of self-understanding; Justine or Nessim, Clea or the putative writer could be ordinary people but we would never know.

Durrell masterfully mixes metaphor and sets atmosphere; he is writing of world, that like the love story itself, is long part of the past. He sweeps us along with him, and we enjoy the experience of reading emotionally as well as intellectually. The success of the quartet is not only literary, but also emotional and sensual. Self-Understanding, Alienation, Coming to terms lost love, not sentimentalizing the past, building a rich tapestry of the present and hope for the future all form elements of the catharsis in this novel.

Durrell fits into a rich tradition that includes Marguerite Duras and Ford Maddox Ford -- writers who meditate on language and love using a place, a time and a notion of the 'foreign' to express their character's alienation and attempts at self-understanding.

i first read the Quartet when I was 14 and thought it was beautiful beyond words. The way Durrell could create a mood and the romanticism that never became sentimental. When I read it,I felt I could almost feel the heat in an Alexandrian street and smell the scents of an Egyptian market.
Time hasn't changed my perspective.
I think that had Durrell had a less irreverent attitude, personified in the character of Pursewarden in the novels, and had he been more ponderous, he would have won the Nobel.
The Quartet is an incomparable, unsurpassed artistic experience. Quite candidly, I have never read anything else quite like it.

Durrell is a master with the word and the mind-- his creation of four separate books are united by love, deceit, and desperate measures, wrapped in sensual language and the exotic backdrop of Alexandria. His machinations take the reader by surprise, with multi-faceted characters that appear destined for one obsession, yet consumed by another. His vivid descriptions of expatriate life rival those of his contemporaries Evelyn Waugh or H.E. Bates. Engrossing.

Here is my take on Justine, one of the four novels that make up "The Alexandria Quartet". I found it to be deeply moving. His poetic style is unmatched by any modern author.

In Justine, by Lawrence Durell, L.G. Darley is faced with a dilemma common to most, if not all people: the expression of love. Torn between two women, Darley struggles to fill an inner void, yet both Justine and Melissa succeed in fulfilling only part of that need, each in their own unique way. However, Darley's problem is not so much a struggle between two women, as it is a struggle between two characteristics of love: his passion for Justine, his affection for Melissa. Lawrence Durell states that the subject of his novel is the investigation of modern love. If by modern love he meant the unwillingness to combine passion and affection, then Darley proved Durell right in more ways than one.

Love itself contains contrasting reactions of joy and pain; foolishness and maturity. It is also a test of one's responsibility, a responsibility that Darley is not ready to develop. He makes no attempt to fuse these seemingly bipolar features of love into one, fully developed relationship. Darley is not prepared to commit to a mature alliance. He is not inclined to renounce his freedom. In short, whether for fear or obstinacy, or both, Darley avoids the responsibilities of adulthood.

Thus, Darley embarks on his obsession with Justine and her multi-mirrored, mysterious personality. With Justine, Darley is able to perpetuate his immaturity. He is utterly attracted not only to her beauty, but also to her wealth. However, he soon becomes aware that, unlike Melissa, Justine has a complete lack of interest in his human weaknesses. In her he saw "a child of the city, which decrees that its women shall be the voluptuaries not of pleasure but of pain, doomed to hunt for what they least dare to find" (47). Her sole interest is in robbing from him only that which she will allow herself to take, and offer him only that which she feels is appropriate to give. Nothing more. " . . . no justifications" (86). "Where the carrion is" Justine herself quoted, "there the eagles will gather" (49). Above all, Darley learns that such relationships can be "destructive and hopeless" (198). Yet his constant attempt at dodging the responsibilities that come with his obvious love for Melissa, prevent him from entering a mature, "therapeutic alliance" with her. He is aware that every kiss shared with Justine will take him further away from Melissa and he does little, if anything, to prevent it. Why should he? Afterall, Melissa is a reflection of his destitution. She represents the "dead level of things" (23). They are "fellow-bankrupts" (23). There is nothing enigmatic about her to reveal, no excitement for him to discover. Instead, she has exposed her own vulnerability and weakness and he did not even have to pry them out of her. Her love ". . . is too confiding: it blinds her" Clea says (130).

Yet, in his own seemingly insensitive way, Darley loves Melissa, though he cannot seem to explain these feelings to himself, much less to her. "There are only three things you can do with a woman," Clea says, "You can love her, suffer for her or turn her into literature" (22). In claiming to be a failure in all three areas, Darley admits his own lack of potential. However, although he avoids expressing his love to Melissa, his keen sensitivity of her gentle, melancholic, nature is sincere. Never is this more apparent than in the following passage: It was at this time that I was becoming aware of how much Melissa was suffering. But not a word of reproach ever escaped her lips, nor did she ever speak of Justine. But she had taken on a lacklustre, unloved colour - her very flesh; and paradoxically enough though I could hardly make love to her without an effort, yet I felt myself at this time to be more deeply in love with her than ever before (97).

Nevertheless, Darley lets her slip from his hands and loses Justine as well.

Perhaps it would have been impossible for Darley to love Melissa or Justine in any other way. Each woman represented the two sides of his character, which he was not ready to merge; however, this may have also been something over which Darley had limited control. Love is multi-faceted, and Melissa and Justine themselves could only express a fraction of its diversity. As a consequence, any attempt on Darley's part to fuse these disconnected expressions of love, with either woman, would have proved futile. It would take a woman who uniformly encompassed all these characteristics of love to help him mend the break. Only then would he learn to love more completely.