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Paperback
Publisher: Penguin (Non-Classics)
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| Flawed but masterly meditation on the vagaries of love |
| Customer Rating: 5 out of 5 |
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Somewhere in the Alexandria Quartet one of its characters (Pursewarden I think - it's been years since I read it) declaims, `Great literature is that which marches in tune with the cosmology of the age'. Durrell sought to follow this dictum in writing the Quartet. The result could have been pretentious but amazingly he pulls it off thanks to the richness of his prose, the intricacy of his vision and the depth of his insight into the human condition.
As other reviewers have pointed out, the structure of the quartet mirrors relativity theory: three of the novels expand plotlines along axes of perspective and character, the fourth (Mountolive) expanding the time dimension. The notion that `what happened' is dependent on one's viewpoint also pervades the narrative.
Yet I would suggest that in metaphysical terms the book draws at least as heavily on quantum mechanics, particularly the Heisenbergian notion that truth becomes less certain the more closely one attempts to know it. What was the fate of Justine's missing child? Did Nessim order his brother's murder? Was Justine's seduction of Darley merely a ploy to gain information from the British Secret Service? The closer we look into these questions and the more detail we discover, the more evasive the answers become.
The book has its weaknesses, some of them serious. The politics is neo-colonial. The `novel within a novel' in Justine is indistinguishable in style from Justine itself. The characters are immersed in a kind of existential narcissism and speak almost exclusively in aphorisms. Some of the characters (Scobie for example) tend towards caricature.
Yet these weaknesses, which might have been fatal to a lesser novel, are merely blemishes in an astounding masterpiece. Just today I was reminded of the scene with the old furrier - Melissa's former lover - on his deathbed, dispensing gifts from `the inexhaustible treasury of his dying' - and Darley's jealous, cowardly fear that the old man's unsuspected greatness of character might yet steal back Melissa's heart.
The Quartet is, above all, a meditation on the agonies and exultations of love in its myriad glorious and terrible forms - perhaps the greatest such meditation ever written. I've read this work many times over the years, and I look forward to revisiting its world once again.
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| Unreadable Dreck |
| Customer Rating: 1 out of 5 |
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The blurbs on this volume give the game away: the notices (one from Newsweek and one from the long-defunct New York Herald Tribune) date from its release a half-century or so ago. Indeed, the Alexandria Quartet hasn't aged well, but between its puerile conceits and purple prose, I find it hard to believe it was ever well received. (I asked an older friend how it had managed to gain a reputation and he attributed its success to the boredom of the late 50s. "Could that explain Mailer too?" quipped another friend of mine.) I was drawn to the Quartet because I was intrigued by its structure: four volumes recounting roughly the same events from four different perspectives employing various narratorial devices. Also, as a fan of Proust, the promised psychological approach and, yes, lurid subject matter appealed to me. But 70 pages in, stuck in a novel-within-a-novel even worse than the actual one, I couldn't bear it anymore. If you're thinking of buying this book, read the opening paragraphs, with their multiple ellipses and exclamation points, to give you a taste of what you'd be in for. If you're in the mood for a multivolume meditation on love and friendship that vividly depicts a time and place--and is witty to boot--check out Anthony Powell's A Dance to the Music of Time or the big guy, Proust himself.
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| A PASION FRUIT |
| Customer Rating: 5 out of 5 |
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Well... i read the Alexandrea Quartet many years ago and i was completely amazed by the way Durrell could recreate the real and external world of a group of friends who lives in Alexandria while their internal peregrination. In my opinion the best characters are Justine and Clea. And not because i am a woman but because they are sharp and also round and full of shades. Eventhough you can read each book separeted it is much better if you read the whole quartet.
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| A Broken Beauty |
| Customer Rating: 5 out of 5 |
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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.
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| The Anti-Proust? |
| Customer Rating: 4 out of 5 |
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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.
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