Rating: 
Summary: Painting in prose. Characters and culture discovered! WOW!
Review: The prose is stupendous! Europeans and Arabs living in a world adrift in the sea of life. Characters live the examined life. Life seen as an art of passion and decision. Through the eccentric characters and eccentric events, we see people trying to make sense out of what is essentially a river of life. Currents go where they may. Set in Alexandria before WWII, the same novel is written from four different viewpoints. By the fourth novel the realty of the events is no more known than life itself. Humanity at its most frail, and its best in the same creatures. Some lines will become thoughts that stay with you forever!
ENJOY!
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Summary: Wondrous Form and Lyricism
Review: Many novelists have crafted interesting forms and many novelists write with a lyricism more akin to poetry than prose; in this novel, Durrell accomplishes both with an intelligence of observation about the lives we invent as human beings in our historical and conditioning world. Magical love stories woven with humane philosophical brilliance
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Summary: No book has resonated more over the decades since publicatio
Review: No book has resonated more over the decades since publication than the Axendiren Quartet. The characters still come to mind with a clarity that must be the result of the multiple points of view. Durrell is epigramatic in the best sense of the word. Read him again and phrases will jump off the page with a familiairty that makes one think they are one's own invention. The best
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Summary: Experience the lifelong resonance of THE ALEXANDRIA QUARTET
Review: For desert island reading or otherwise, THE ALEXANDRIA QUARTET
offers nourishment for the soul, imaginative adventure, magnificent prose and lifelong resonance. Lawrence Durrell's
superb achievement is a legacy of unforgettable characters
and locales encompassing truths, challenging perceptions and stretching the limits of fiction. Don't let another year slip
by without experiencing this remarkable work.
Rating:
Summary: A successful experiment
Review: The Alexandria Quartet was an attempt to tell the same story from different points of view, without puting the reader to sleep with repetition. It was also four very fine novels.
I recommend a facsimile edition, if any exist, so as to get the original type font, which is evocative without getting in the way of the reading. Nothing, in fact, gets in the way of the reading--not Durrell's ambitions plan for the four novels, nor his numerous opinions on life, people, and literature, nor the most exotic setting for any great novel that I can remember.
If you don't care much for great literature, read this for its readability, and for a look at two things that seemed permanent when the books were written, but are now vanished: the British Empire, and the separate world of "the East," spreading from Turkey to Japan.
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Summary: A wary review - Durrell and Faulkner and Joyce
Review: I read these books a long time ago when I was in a different stage of my own life. The review I make here is thus not based on an up-to- date fresh reading but on the impressions that have remained with me in time. The first is the beauty and sensuality of the language , a kind of poetic richness which for many readers it seems is falsely lush but once struck me as true. Secondly, the exotic and mysterious world, the whole way Durrell succeeds in creating the atmosphere of a place. This also moved me and reminded me too of the way Camus succeeds in creating a feeling of Oran in the Plague. Durrell's Alexandria was so different from any world I had known that this mysterious quality was extremely strong for me. Thirdly, and this seemed especially problematic and puzzling to me then while perhaps now years later it is more familiar and yet still morally problematic. It is what might be called ' the 'mature and sophisticated approach to love'. When I read these book I very much had in mind a clear and simple model as ideal of love( I still do) as one man loves one woman and is loved by her in return. Here ' love- means something different , with feelings being broken up and directed to more than one person, with their being lack of mutuality in love. Certain aspects of this more mature world remain somehow strange and morally discomfiting to me. Durrell's multiple perspectives , his retelling a story in more than one way, his seeing characters from a variety of viewpoints have it seems to me their corollary in Faulkner and Joyce. However Durrell's characters seem to me less ' solid' somehow and less substantial than Faulkner's or Joyce's. I must also say that while at certain points in the long reading there is a strong desire to know what happens next, and what will turn out with the characters- at some other point it becomes clear that their histories their actual 'fates' are not really the important thing for Durrell. He is painting a picture and the picture in words he is painting shifts its shape and form as it goes on and it will never even when the last word is written take on a final shape or form. The characters are elements in the picture and seem to dissolve as if too their final reality is as part of a landscape. Durrell I believe talks at some point about some kind of new four- dimensional Einsteinian picture of human character and that picture seems to leave no place for old time three- dimensional character.
All in all there remains a me a vague sense of a strange world somehow distant and appealing , and poetically rich but forever remote .
Is this great literature? It seems to me that it might be. But I don't really know. Is it interesting writing and a way of seeing things extremely new for me and I believe for most readers? Definitely yes. Is this book for everybody? I don't think so, but many can enjoy it .
Would I spend again all the hours I spent once reading it?
I don't think so -which of course does not mean that other reader should not.
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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.
Rating: 
Summary: Strongest At the Middle
Review: I would have happily given this series five stars had not the last book ended so disappointingly. The first and fourth books are the weakest, Justine because of Darley's immense naivete, and Clea because the exigencies of plot become contrived, the characters falling to the mercy of Durrell's need to make something happen. The Quartet is strongest, in my opinion, when little or nothing is actually happening. It is in the seemingly random recollections of incidents in the first two books that Durrell's theories (illustrated within the books by the metafictional character of Pursewarden, the novelist) work best, each showing events which will recur in later books and be explained in an entirely different way. Who is Justine? What is the reason for Pursewarden's fate? What, in fact, is the true face of any of these characters? The answer seems to be a multiplicity--every interpretation bears equal weight, which is to say none at all. At times Durrell's prose is not equal to the ambition of his narrative, but this is truly a fascinating read, especially for writers and students of literature.
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