Rating: 
Summary: Clea, the unknowable, lovable Clea
Review: I would have given the book a rating of 5 stars if it were not for Mountolive, the weakest book of the quartet. But, nevermind! I was not able to get a copy of balthazar after about 4 months after reading Justine. I made up my mind not to read Mountolive and Clea without first reading Balthazar. Obviously, I made the wrong choice. For the quartet presents the same story in different time and perspective. Justine was well written and beautiful. I don't know if I would be hypnotized by Justine but i do know that Clea is something else. It was a different feeling after reading Clea. I immediately set out to find her. But she is only in literature. And yet I could not get her out of my mind. The words Durrell used to describe Justine and Clea were magnificent. He did not used words like "beautiful" and "pretty". He had the uncanny ability to say those two words in infinite sentences with each word lingering to our senses long after we have read it. It was really a dishonor to Durrell and other Quartet lovers that his book was ranked very low in Modern Library's 100 best books of the century.
Rating: 
Summary: Sound and scent rise from the page.
Review: 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.
Rating:
Summary: Beautiful Beyond Words
Review: 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.
Rating:
Summary: Obsession
Review: I am obsessed with the Alexandria Quartet. Shortly after beginning the first, I read all four books before I even thought about looking at my homework. I rarely get a chance to read fiction, because college devours every scrap of my spare time. Yet these books are worth every shred of I homework I didn't do. I wanted to reread all four the instant I finished. Lawrwnce Durrell has been praised so thoroughly that I don't know where to begin. The Alexandria Quartet is his masterpiece, a work of art heartbreaking in its beauty.
Rating:
Summary: How to explain wise men's sad joy of loneliness
Review: When I finished the story I knew that this is one of the rare meetings of my life; for it is hard to find a similar soul. I also write novels and I think the Quartet is something you always have to follow; even though you probably never reach its perfection. At the best parts I felt some mature, beautiful spleen: bright, pure and without bitterness. It may sounds strange but among the few stories where I found something similar there are some brilliant spy stories by Graham Greene and John LeCarré. (There is only one hero in my memories who is so weak and wise at the same time: the drunk publisher Barley Scott-Blair in LeCarré's "The Russia House".) This is the view of a man who lost many precious things but found himself. You can almost hear the charming song of calm loneliness over the roofs of Alexandria. And you can learn something about love again - or if you have already experienced the dirty voices of a romantic love song, you can comfort youl guilty soul with Durrell's words.
Rating:
Summary: dangerous adjectives
Review: This quartet is a dangerous work. I read Clea in the early 60's as a young teenager, and was compelled to read the rest.
It affect me so much that every time I meet a woman with the name Justine I am cast into a melancholic fugue.
LGD has been ridiculed by the literary establishment since the 80's, I maintain this work is so powerful it should be locked away from teenagers, together with its epigraphic precursor by the divine Marquis.
Rating: 
Summary: Minuteness left beauty entirely behind
Review: I don't remember when last I read any prose that comprises of mainly adjectives! I was constantly groping for my red pen to edit out the superfluous ones. Of course, descriptions are necessary but the overabundance here completely defeats the purpose. I can't describe what I mean better than to quote Jane Austen: "Every view was pointed out with a minuteness which left beauty entirely behind." So also Durrell. The excess of words and descriptive expressions, intended no doubt to paint vivid images in our minds, hamper the reader instead of creating a stage for the drama about to unfold. We are lost among the brushes, pigments and paint tubes, never getting far away enough to see the whole painting. I usually 'disappear' into literature but when reading this man's words I can't for a moment forget that I'm reading.
Rating:
Summary: Justine
Review: The first of four of what is called as the Alexandria Quartet, Justine is the narrators attempt to understand his affair with beautiful and mysterious Justine, the sensuos and amoral wife of the wealthy Nessim. Durrell sets the mood through the mystery of Alexandria with its rich blend of Europeans and Africans.
Rating:
Summary: terrible beautifull
Review: Great writing,
it's for me the best book I ever read, (together with
Anna Karinina), Recommend it to everyone
Rating:
Summary: a spectacular sequence that will temporary obsess
Review: Of the four books in this series you will finish realizing that you've read one. Justine, the first, is my favorite, but that isn't really saying anything. The story is visual and oddly cyclical, the same events being restated from confused, conflicting perspectives that keep changing their minds. Basically there are love affairs, heightened by anxieties that sometimes lie outside of passion. Here we have artists and diplomats and natives and religious fanatics all waiting to burst, all too important to set aside. Everyone matters in the Alexandria Quartet and no one understands where anyone else is coming from. This is a tense, rapid, confusing story about pinnicle moments and the guilt that follows. Great stuff. Take your time.
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