![]() ![]() Darley, Melissa, Justine, and her husband Nessim develop a complicated relationship afterwards. And I fell in love with the lyrical voice of Durrell/Darley, the schoolteacher-novelist narrator who falls in love with Justine, the exotic, promiscuous, mysterious woman no man can apparently resist: she is a kind of Cleopatra.īefore Darley met Justine, he was involved with Melissa, a frail, hashish-smoking exotic dancer. I spent most of my time sweatily reading in the back yard. I first read The Alexandria Quartet in my student days in Bloomington, during a typically humid, hot Midwestern summer, with oversized verdant plants climbing and blowsy flowers blooming. In the ’50s, Durrell’s poeticism flourished. ![]() Published from 1957 to 1960, these books are elegant but occasionally too flowery. Other characters, particularly Balthazar and Clea (Mountolive is the hero of the prequel), contribute their viewpoints, so that a clearer picture is revealed. Over the course of the quartet, Durrell’s narrator, Darley, reiterates and augments a series of events in the lives of his lover Justine and a group of friends in Alexandria, Egypt. ![]() The narrative is psychologically-oriented and fragmented. ![]() In his gorgeously-written, percipient tetralogy, Justine, Balthazar, Mountolive, and Clea, the prose is moody and lush. Lawrence Durrell’s The Alexandria Quartet is not for everybody. ![]()
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