Justine (The Alexandria Quartet, I)

Rating:
Summary: I got through it
Review: I wanted to like this book, but it was rough going. I kept waiting for a story to kick in but I couldn't stick with it enough and would leave it for a few weeks. That didn't help.

What kept me going was the hope of running into a passage like this: "Loving is so much truer when sympathy and not desire makes the match; for it leaves no wounds." I liked observations like that but I just couldn't get into the story.
To be more honest, I couldn't find the story.

Rating:
Summary: Nine thumbs down
Review: I wish I had read this book before recommending it to my book group. Of nine avid readers, only one person besides me finished the book. It seems to have lost its power over the 45 years since its publication. The prose is thick, and sometimes impressive, but rarely gratifying. The characters as they are portrayed are not full humans, so it is difficult to care what happens to them. The misogyny and racism in the writing are more offensive than they may have been in the 50s.

I only read Justine, the first book in the Alexandria Quartet. People who read the four books long ago and loved them assured me that Justine stands on its own, and that it is not necessary to read all four volumes. After finishing Justine, I doubt this. Descriptions I have read of the Quartet mention a political subtext, as well as resolution to some of the confusing events and characters, which are not present in Justine.

Rating:
Summary: the go-to on the allstar team
Review: If the Alexandria Quartet was an allstar team (as i think it certainly should be, put it against any series of stories, bible included:)) then Justine would have to be the superstar. Balthazar and Mountolive, solid role players, stars in their ownright, but still fall in the shadow of their older sister. Now I've heard talk that Clea is really the true star, and I really want to agree - however Justine started it all and somehow holds a slight edge over Clea, which doesn't mean that Clea gives any quarter to any book - she just came happened to come second.
I was surprised to see 1 and 2 star reviews. I'd suggest to these people to read it again. All four together form this incredible little space in a world far away - characters so enjoyable and delightful - a city and culture so different yet completely understandable. Justine starts is all off and if you commit totally during those first few pages, the rest will be one of the most satisfying reads you've had the pleasure of.
The premise of Justine could be seen a simple. It's about love and how much pain it can cause. Alone Justine would be a simply stunning book, but leading off for 4 makes it a true revelation. There is pain and joy in this book at anyone can relate to, in fact embrace, and once you get there, the book is difficult to put down.
Lawrence Durrell doesn't miss a word, doesn't blink an eye, planting surprises in each corner of his mysterious Alexandria. Reading this book one can't help but think of another way to live, in another place, with all the secrets that hide in the eyes of everyone you see.
Justine is a great book. Sometimes it takes a little effort to get the prize.

Rating:
Summary: The entire spectrum of human love is aspected here.
Review: If you have ever been in love with more than a human--but a force of nature--then you will understand Laurence Durrell's novel. It will affect everyone who has ever loved and those who have not. The helplessness one can feel when responding to someone who takes your breath away is depicted here.

Rating:
Summary: Not my literary taste.....
Review: If you like Proust , you will like Durrell. A master of painting with words,somehow the characters pale compared to the description of the scenery ,which in the case of Alexandria is breathtaking. Novels are not all timeless , and the few that are make College Litt-1.Not my taste , but then I do not like Proust either and file him under'forced reading'

Rating:
Summary: Not my literary taste.....
Review: If you like Proust , you will like Durrell. A master of painting with words,somehow the characters pale compared to the description of the scenery ,which in the case of Alexandria is breathtaking. Novels are not all timeless , and the few that are make College Litt-1.Not my taste , but then I do not like Proust either and file him under'forced reading'

Rating:
Summary: Grotesque-triste
Review: Justine is a gallery of desperate characters, lost in the labyrinth of the self. Incapable of helping themselves or each other, they wound one another or allow themselves to be wounded, instead. In the character of Justine is the intensification of the novel, its bruised and bloody heart. The lines between cruelty and weakness blur and dissolve in her person, and we quickly learn that everyone is a victim of their own temperament, and that no one is to blame.

Justine is a book full of awful music and terrible poetry, of helpless posession and excorcism,of bitter truths & life-sustaining illusions. A pained and painful meditation on Love and, ultimately, Life.

For all of Mr. Durrell's masterfully crafted and stirring descriptions of Alexandria, the city soon falls off (like so much dead skin) and, there emerges the Human Face - grimacing.

Rating:
Summary: Justine and the beauty of language
Review: Justine is a work of ethereal beauty whose text at times borders on poetic prose. With the exception of Proust, I cannot recall an author who so tenderly employs the use of metaphors to illustrate and develop his themes. Durrell has created an inveterate masterpiece whose characters are victims of their unfettered passions and longings, and cannot help but inflict pain upon those closest to them. The way Durrell describes a glance of Justine's or the narrator's anguish upon the recollection of his beloved Melissa is absolutely moving. Nowhere will you see a more vivid portrait of the human condition depicted in such beautifully poetic terms.

The novel is basically structured upon the recollections of the narrator and the interwoven relationships he was a part of in pre-war (WWII) Alexandria, Egypt. Love is examined on many different levels within this work, each character a personification of a separate plateau, whose apex is only pain and misfortune. Justine is a novel whose indigenous beauty stems from her character's proclivities and shortcomings-they are victims of an unbridled passion that is at times tender, yet always ruthless.

Rating:
Summary: Description, yes. Plot and characters, no.
Review: Lawrence Durrell, Justine (Cardinal, 1957)

Well, my two-month struggle with the first hundred fifty pages of the first novel of the Alexandria Quartet has left me with one resolution: I will never read the other three (or, probably, any other Durrell).

Don't get me wrong. Durrell writes beautiful prose. The descriptions of Alexandria are lush, detailed, and really give the reader a feel for the city. You can almost feel the heat baking out of the clay as night goes on.

The problem is, aside from Alexandria itself, there's not a single character in the novel worth caring about, not a plotline worth following (for that matter, what little plot there is in the novel appears and disappears at random like a faraway TV signal on an old Zenith black-and-white). There's nothing to do but marvel at the beauty of Alexandria. Which, I guess, is fine for folks who take week-long vacations to a particular tourist spot, and then go stare at that landmark for eight hours a day as it steadfastly refuses to do anything but sit there. Perhaps it's a mark of my lack of attention span, bad breeding, or what have you, but I like there to be at least minimal action in a novel. If I wanted a book where absolutely nothing happens, I'd read Stephen Jay Gould. (zero)

Rating:
Summary: Adrift in Alexandria
Review: The British novelist Lawrence Durrell seeks to make a stylistic first impression. "Justine," the first volume of his "Alexandria" quartet of novels, exhibits his technique as an almost continuous stream of metaphorical associations as conjured by a writer imaginative with adjectives and in rapturous love with his exotic setting. Comparisons with other world-traveling literary modernists like Henry Miller and Paul Bowles are appropriate, but Durrell is more coherent than the former and more poetic than the latter, ultimately finding an unexplored niche somewhere between the two.

Set entirely in the historically and culturally rich coastal Egyptian city in the years preceding World War II, the novel is narrated by an unnamed Irish schoolteacher who keeps company with a colorful array of friends and lovers. The plot is a classic love triangle in which the narrator is having an affair with Justine, the voluptuous wife of his friend Nessim, a wealthy Copt. However, the novel is not as erotic as it could be given this premise; Durrell is much more interested in decorating the personalities of his characters to reveal their desires, fears, and motivations, allowing the characters to massage the plot rather than vice versa. For example, it is with a great amount of narrative preparation that Durrell springs a crucial scene in which one of the main characters, a Greek woman named Melissa who works as a dancer at a night club, approaches Nessim with the news that his wife is being unfaithful to him.

The novel has two levels of intrigue. One is that Justine is a woman of dire secrets, searching the city's houses of child prostitution for something dear she has lost and hiding the true nature of her relationship with a rich, lecherous ogre named Capodistria. The second is that of a conspicuous local doctor named Balthazar, one of the narrator's close friends, whose interests are pederasty and the Cabbalah and who is being investigated by an aged Secret Service officer named Scobie assigned to uncover avenues of espionage in Alexandria. Uniting these two threads is an independent, mercurial woman named Clea, friend to both Justine and Scobie, who is not so much introduced as a character as she is suffused throughout the story like a perfume to be sniffed here and there.

With an obviously intimate knowledge of Alexandria, Durrell describes the city and its surroundings in stunning detail that avoids the rigid tone of a travel guide, capturing the natural diversity of its population represented by his selection of characters. A cosmopolitan mixture of sophistication and squalor seemingly modeled on Miller's Paris, his Alexandria is virtually an original literary milieu, replete with possibilities for the expanse of British expatriate fiction.