The Alexandria Quartet: Justine/Balthazar/Mountolive/Clea/Boxed Set

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Summary: The experience of a lifetime
Review: This hypnotic, mesmerizing series of books will forever change you and your perception of the world. I can only call their effect on me cataclysmic;- whole passages, evocative and unforgettable, are effortlessly committed to memory. One enters into the city of Alexandria, and walks its streets, the scents, the sounds, the sights a panorama of emotion. I have never before or since delved into fictional characters to the point where I honestly believed them real, so flawed, so intense is their portrayal. I envy the reader opening the covers of Justine for the first time. It is the beginning of a journey that will remain with you always.

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Summary: A work that will always remain with you.
Review: I read the Quartet before, during and after a trip to the Middle East. I think it would have an equally powerful but different impact upon me if I had not read it there, but the added proximity to the site of the fictional events added a great deal to the power of the novels. I can only say someday I will have to read them again. The works are too rich, too complex, too powerful to grasp in one reading. I felt like I was only skimming the surface of a great sea of emotion, action and thought. So much remains a mystery, and I suspect it always will. Perhaps that's part of what makes it such a great work.

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Summary: ALexandria Quartet is the novel of the millenium
Review: It is not a Masterpiece. It is the best book ever written. Full of characters poetry and love. Lawrence durrell said that it is an inquiry about modern love. This book is perfect in every sence. Alexandria the city with its beauty and decline is the inspiration power. The novel of the millenium. Really. This book has the power to change your life or at least put you in a world so exotic amazing and real that you will start losing your words and breath.

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Summary: an exotic, comic and totally satisfying epic
Review: i picked up the 2nd book by accident and got horribly confused about 20 pages into it. then i bought all the books, and all was lost. anything i've to say is trite and meaningless- just trust the other reviewers, spend the $40 and buy these books.

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Summary: A book from which I still haven't recovered
Review: Nothing quite prepared me for this masterpiece. "What's it about?" friends ask. Any explanation I offer seems to fall flat. Then I refer them to the scene in "Justine," when the title character says: "Who invented the humn heart, I wonder. Tell me, and then show me the place where he was hanged." If you've never felt that, then you've never really loved. If you've never experienced this masterpiece, then you've never really read.

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Summary: A completely enjoyable read
Review: 'The Alexandria Quartet' is an outsider in the modern literary canon; however, it consists of more than beautiful prose and an exquisite juxtaposition of images. Durrell is important not just for creating 'new' & colourful scenes, but for making the freshness of the modern literary movement into something which is valuable and moving. His inventiveness in regard to form does nothing short of comment on the nature and capacity of narrative itself. One is left wondering, 'If narrative cannot claim to present any kind of reality, and if the events / plot are of secondary importance, then what is it that remains which is so compelling?' In a sense, it is a romantic 'Tristram Shandy', with allusions and philosophical gestures to satisfy any reader. As much as I think that this work is remarkable, I must admit that Durrell eclipses it in his later 'Alexandria Quintet'.

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Summary: A loved companion to return to
Review: The Alexandria Quartet has been with me since 1974 and will never leave me. Durrell's powerful, poetical prose and the ingenious literary method of telling the same story from four angles makes this work one of the heavyweight classics of English literature. "Truth", said Balthazar, blowing his nose in an old tennis sock "is the thing that contradicts itself most in time".

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Summary: The Quartet As Endless
Review: If there is any series of books that have been consistantly important to me, I must shout out the name "Alexandria Quartet!" No other series has ever captivated me so. It has become my tool towards creativity. Whenever inspiration is needed, I pull any of the first three novels from my shelf. The Quartet allows for numerous readings... I've lost count of how many times I have read Justine. Check out Durrell's earlier "The Black Book" for the same sort of feeling. Deis!

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Summary: The vast panorama of life
Review: You might as well read what the other "Customer Critics" wrote. I agree with them all in rating this book so highly. I was told that I couldn't consider myself educated in the English language until I had read these books. I read them based on that advice. While living on a kibbutz in Israel, I clumsily attempted to seduce an attractive young visitor. She spurned my advances. As an apology, I thrust the books at her. A few years later she contacted me to tell me how much she enjoyed the books. I wonder where she is now.

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Summary: The finest works of modern English
Review: The Alexandria Quartet ia a literary response to the theory of relativity. In the first volume the narrator tells of his experiences in Alexandria. He sends his work to Dr. Balthazar who writes what is essentially an interlinear. Balthazar has a different slant on the meaning of the events chronicled in volume one. The remaining volumes, each from a different perspective, throw more light (and thus change the shadows) on the events. Truth, it seems, depends on the angle from which you view it.