Rating: 
Summary: I got through it
Review: Don't believe the hype. This book is not a masterpiece, but if you are able to stick through the piles of metaphorical images that are at moments beautiful but most often don't quite make sense together and make it to the end of this novel you'll be pleased to find some actual action and true emotion in Justine. It took me a very long time to read through the first half of this book. The narrator is irritatingly affected and the writing drags with a myriad of descriptions that are uneffective at creating a cohesive picture. But what kept me going were Durrell's secondary characters. He has a nack for capturing and creating quirkiness that borders on bizarre and his stories of the more minor men and women in Justine are striking, emotional, and entertaining. I am glad that I was able to make it to the end of the novel (there is a hospital scene that made it all worth while), but I do regret that I recommended this novel to my bookgroup and I do not plan to complete the quartet.
Rating: 
Summary: Maybe not for you
Review: Durrell's writing may not be for everyone. As several other reviewers complained, there's not a whole lot of action, especially in the beginning of the novel; however, Durrell's prose is abolutely luminous and his study of Gnosticism, Kabbalah and other mysticism makes the text even richer.
Rating:
Summary: If you like the DaVinci Code, this is NOT for you...
Review: I have never read a book as well penned as Justine. It is the type of book that could send an aspiring writer into a bout of deep depression as they are confronted with a tapestry of words ostensibly woven out of gold. My only consolation is that L.D. wrote this in a time where there was no Cable TV, Internet, MSN messenger, cell phones, etc. I read the other reviews and was apalled when I read how other "book fanatics" found this book to be complete rubbish. My advice to them is learn how to really communicate with a book...it requires a lot more concentration, intention, and commitment than watching Sex in the City.
It is not an easy read. It is not full of banal dialogue or easily digestible platitudes. It is composed of mellifluous and thoughtful utterances, indelible landscapes, and psychological/metaphysical nuances (yes, nuances!). This is a book that all writers need to read. It offers you a porthole into the headspace of a fellow artist, tormented, self deprecating, yet proud at the same time.
Arabs, Jews, Copts, and Kabbalists collide, coexist, and sometimes even influence eachother in the Alexandria Quartet. Watching the way these religions served as cultural molds instead of moral guidelines served as a barometer for the times juxtaposing the religious extremism that has made such a comeback in the Middle East today. Egypt has been written about since the beginning of time, and the Middle East is the origin of civilization as we know it. Alexandria is the backdrop for a pre/post WWII drama and is rife with adultery, prostitution, STDs, alcoholism, foreign affairs, and most importantly to me; the loyalty that unifies family and friends.
This book tops my Great Books List...a list that includes Tolstoy, Joyce, Proust, etc... If you are willing to put in the time and effort required for this masterpiece of English literature, you will be handsomely rewarded.
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: 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'
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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.
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: Pretentious Eyewash
Review: This is truly a dreadful, dreadful novel. I am aghast (but not really surprised) that some critics actually think this is one of the great books of the last century. That is a joke. This may be fare for an English grad working on his Ph.D. in "Obscure Writing in Literature" but I think the average reader of novels won't waste her time on this pretentious eyewash. In the first 30 pages of "Justine" the only action that occurs is that the characters share a tin of olives in a bookstore. So forget your plot. Poetic descriptions of Alexandria fly at the reader like snowflakes in a blizzard, one after another, each flowery and beautiful, but not building on a whole, so that the reader is overwhelmed and left with no strong feeling for the city, only vague notions. What is the benefit of that? It is the job of the writer to convey impressions, not befuddle the reader. I think Durrell is a lazy writer, billiant possibly but undisciplined. The narrator of the story (if you can call this a story) similarly drones on and on with recollections of other characters from his past but in fragments, jumping from one to another character, so that, again, no tangible or even interesting impression of a subject can be built by the reader. Reading "Justine" is like eating cotton candy: all sweet and pretty pink and airy nothingness. This is considered great writing by critics, to slog through literary muck. If you want to impress your literary buddies at the next soiree, buy and read "Justine" and then, sipping your chardonnay and nibbling on you brie, you can offer, "I'm reading The Alexandria Quartet. Lovely writing, don't you think?" But, if you want a readable, entertaining, unpretentious novel, look elsewhere.
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