Justine (The Alexandria Quartet, I)

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: 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.

Rating:
Summary: The Bigguns Have Come
Review: When I say bigguns, I really mean "pretty words" and/or "incredible writing". So, whassup how's it going? No, but really... this book had me at hello. No matter how cliche that sounds. The strangest part about it was that it actually said "Hello!" to me. At first, I was afraid, and I hurled the book away in terror. But then, I thought, "Hey, I'm cool! That book's cool, we can chill together." And we did. Here's the thing: Lawrence Durrell is very good at making dusty egyptian scenes and writing angst-filled woeful monologues about the women who are incapable of deeper love. The titles of his books are deceiving in that they, with "Justine", "Balthazar", and so on, appear to be about those people. However, Justine plays about as big of a role in "Justine" as she does in "Balthazar". This book is one of four of the "Alexandria Quartet". It is about the city through the eyes of the narrator, which is a stunning and whirlwinding ride, but don't be disappointed for not getting to know the characters better. Love it for what it is.