Justine (Lawrence Durrell)

I have read some of Durrell's travel writing, and I found that very poetic and engaging. This is considered his masterpiece, so I took the book with me on vacation, expecting great things. Woahwee, was I disappointed. I got thru about 50 pages, but it was an uncomfortable and unrewarding slog. The writing was as pretentious as can be - a kind of cynical, Gallic romanticism was being presented that seemed completely out of date and not at all engaging. The main character chattered on about his life in Alexandria, Egypt in, I dont know, the 1940s or 1950s, maybe. He discussed his womanizing friends and their relationships, and the weird women that they got involved with. Some seem to think these books have important things to say about romance and relationships, but I have no clue what those things might be. Durrell seemed to want to conjure up a world of cafe intellectuals in an exotic Mediterranean locale, experiencing passion and the life of the mind, but all I got out... Read more

Justine was published in 1957 to wide acclaim and has been popular with the Brit Lit. set ever since. The novel is set in Alexandria, Egypt shortly before World War II. The book details the English narrator's love for his enchanting and enigmatic mistress Justine who is a married woman involved in this covert and tawdry affair of the heart. Other characters include his live in girlfriend Melissa. In an ironical turn of the screw, Melissa gives birth to a child by Justine's husband the wealthy Egyptian businessman Nessim, In the other three novels of the series this love affair will be explored by using the point of view of other characters. Durrell reminds this reviewer of Marcel Proust in his ability to evoke the sounds, sights and emotions of a city and a human heart. His poetic style is sensual in its ability to make the ear become an eye for the patient reader. Here are some of my favorite quotes from the book: "Her gift was misapplied in being directed towards love"-p. 33 "A... Read more

In the lost city of Alexandria a group of ex-patriots fall into a life of mysticism and sensuality. The opening novel of Lawrence Durrell's Alexandria quartet is a highly polished and intriguing work which tends to create a life of its own as one gets into it. Although Durrell's prose is clearly out of style, the intricate design and rhythm of life he has created in this imaginary place is truly a great achievement. The object of fascination in this introductory work is Justine, the beautiful Jewess of everyone's fancy. Durrell is dealing with post-WWII relativism and the need for Europeans to return 'to an earlier state of things' in the Freudian sense. He has created a complex interweaving of characters; they have escaped their own landscape, but unlike the existentialists, Durrell's portrait insists that true freedom is an illusion.

Durrell's much under-rated poetry finds full amplitude in this Aleandria, the rebuilt library of ancients populated by the wandering rocks of people and emotions. In our current era of stark prose and text messaged sentiments, Durrell will prove to be a heavy read, as laborous as the timepiece hearts he documents, and all of their weird, irrational gears and gyres. Durrell's eye for cosmopolitanism is brilliant: the religions, languages, and daily chores of different cultures teem throughout his work -- never feeling like some cultural backdrop summoned up as window dressing, but as a anthropological landscape of comings and goings. The themes surface simply and poignantly: desire, regret, and the price one pays for age and indifference, "sad, like studying an old passport." With Joyce's attention to language, and Kazantzakis's ethos of passion, Durrell delivers one of the most memorable sweeps of language I have ever come across. See, an editor may read this book and want ... Read more

Half-way through this book, I must confess, I was about to put it aside as hopelessly esoteric and self-indulgent. But the last 100 pages began to take a different character, and by the time I came to the great duck hunt (an almost Tolstoyan set piece that contains the main action of the novel), I couldn't put it down. And I found myself so moved by the brief final section, which bids a temporary farewell to the more important characters, that I went straight to the bookstore to buy the other three novels that make up Durrell's ALEXANDRIA QUARTET. Now fifty pages into BALTHAZAR, the second of them, I feel as though a landscape previously endured under a haze of oppressive heat has been revealed in fresh light under a clear blue sky. THE ALEXANDRIA QUARTET came out in paperback at about the time I was entering university, and my friends and I bought the first volume or two, probably in the hope that reading such an erudite work would brand us as card-carrying intellectuals, besides b... Read more