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4.14 AVERAGE
4.14 AVERAGE
tense
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
No
Loveable characters:
Yes
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
No
Memorable characters, cosmopolitan backdrop
This is one of my favorite series. Durell's quadrilogy is often underrated, described as an expat romance in purple prose. But the writing, while often florid, is beautiful and evocative, and the story told over four books, is a complicated and ever-shifting tale of sex, war, politics and manipulation, set against a backdrop of folklore and myth. It had many flaws, but overall I still think it captures something quite profound about how the world works. After reading the early books over a span of time, when I was much younger, I recently sat down and re-read the whole thing in an omnibus edition -- even after 10 years working in the Middle East, it retained its charm, atmosphere, and sense of truth.
Ιουστίνη ⭐⭐⭐
Ποίηση, ειρωνεία και ανθρώπινα πάθη με φόντο την Καβαφική Αλεξάνδρεια, ή μια Αλεξάνδρεια οικεία μόνο κατ' όνομα, όπως τη γνωρίζουμε μέσα από τη δράση των χαρακτήρων, σίγουρα όχι την "πραγματική". Καθώς είναι μέρος τετραλογίας (δε λέγεται τυχαία αλεξανδρινό κουαρτέτο) θα επανέλθω μετά την ανάγνωση και των τριών επομένων. Μέχρι τότε: παρά τις εμφανείς αρετές του συγγραφέα, η Ιουστίνη αφήνει κάτι να λείπει (εξόν και δοθεί στη συνέχεια), έχει κάτι το ανεκπλήρωτο στο δημιουργικό της κομμάτι (δεν τίθεται θέμα πλοκής, ή τουλάχιστον όχι εδώ). Παρά τις εικόνες που δημιουργεί, παρά τους χαρακτήρες που σκιαγραφεί και την όμορφη γλώσσα, ακόμα και με το χιούμορ που διαποτίζει το έργο, κάτι είναι λειψό ή στραβό, μπορεί ακόμα να είναι και η μέλλον εξεζητημένη πρόζα που αρχικά σε τραβάει στο βιβλίο...
Βαλτάσαρ ⭐⭐⭐⭐
Ή τα πράγματα είναι καλύτερα σε σχέση με την Ιουστίνη, ή άρχισα να συνηθίζω το στυλ του Durrell, όπου η πλοκή είναι μάλλον πρόσχημα για την πρόζα και το ευφυολόγημα. Ο έρωτας και το πάθος είναι πάλι παρόντα, οι ανθρώπινες σχέσεις σε ένα αποκεντρωμένο επίκεντρο.
Παρά το γεγονός της μετοίκησης του "αφηγητή" και το ότι ο χρόνος της αφήγησης είναι μεταγενέστερος, τα γεγονότα είναι της ίδιας περιόδου με της Ιουστίνης, καθώς το βιβλίο λειτουργεί συμπληρωματικά ως προς το πρώτο μέρος και όχι ως συνέχειά του.
Σειρά έχει ο...
Μαουντόλιβ ⭐⭐⭐⭐
Έρωτας, πολιτική και θάνατος, πάντα με φόντο την Αλεξάνδρεια του Durrell, που δεν είναι ούτε ακριβώς αυτή του χάρτη, ούτε ακριβώς αυτή του Καβάφη, μια ποίηση σε λόγο πεζό που αιωρείται πάνω από την πόλη και τις δοσοληψίες των ανθρώπων.
Κλέα ⭐⭐⭐⭐
Τελευταίο μέρος του κουαρτέτου, επτά χρόνια αργότερα. Ο Ντάρλει μεγαλώνει την κόρη της Μελίσσα σε ένα ελληνικό νησί, αλλά προλαβαίνει να βρεθεί στην Αλεξάνδρεια για ώστε πόλεμος, φροϋδισμός και κυνισμός να συναντηθούν στην αγαπημένη πόλη, σαν στρώσεις πάνω απόέναν πυρήνα που πάντα είναι η αγάπη. Και η αλήθεια, πολυπρισματική όσο γίνεται αντιληπτή από διαφορετικούς ανθρώπους. παρά το γεγονός ότι το δεύτερο και το τρίτο βιβλίο είναι μάλλον τα "δυνατότερα" του κουαρτέτου, το τελευταίο σίγουρα δεν είναι αδιάφορο.
Ποίηση, ειρωνεία και ανθρώπινα πάθη με φόντο την Καβαφική Αλεξάνδρεια, ή μια Αλεξάνδρεια οικεία μόνο κατ' όνομα, όπως τη γνωρίζουμε μέσα από τη δράση των χαρακτήρων, σίγουρα όχι την "πραγματική". Καθώς είναι μέρος τετραλογίας (δε λέγεται τυχαία αλεξανδρινό κουαρτέτο) θα επανέλθω μετά την ανάγνωση και των τριών επομένων. Μέχρι τότε: παρά τις εμφανείς αρετές του συγγραφέα, η Ιουστίνη αφήνει κάτι να λείπει (εξόν και δοθεί στη συνέχεια), έχει κάτι το ανεκπλήρωτο στο δημιουργικό της κομμάτι (δεν τίθεται θέμα πλοκής, ή τουλάχιστον όχι εδώ). Παρά τις εικόνες που δημιουργεί, παρά τους χαρακτήρες που σκιαγραφεί και την όμορφη γλώσσα, ακόμα και με το χιούμορ που διαποτίζει το έργο, κάτι είναι λειψό ή στραβό, μπορεί ακόμα να είναι και η μέλλον εξεζητημένη πρόζα που αρχικά σε τραβάει στο βιβλίο...
Βαλτάσαρ ⭐⭐⭐⭐
Ή τα πράγματα είναι καλύτερα σε σχέση με την Ιουστίνη, ή άρχισα να συνηθίζω το στυλ του Durrell, όπου η πλοκή είναι μάλλον πρόσχημα για την πρόζα και το ευφυολόγημα. Ο έρωτας και το πάθος είναι πάλι παρόντα, οι ανθρώπινες σχέσεις σε ένα αποκεντρωμένο επίκεντρο.
Παρά το γεγονός της μετοίκησης του "αφηγητή" και το ότι ο χρόνος της αφήγησης είναι μεταγενέστερος, τα γεγονότα είναι της ίδιας περιόδου με της Ιουστίνης, καθώς το βιβλίο λειτουργεί συμπληρωματικά ως προς το πρώτο μέρος και όχι ως συνέχειά του.
Σειρά έχει ο...
Μαουντόλιβ ⭐⭐⭐⭐
Έρωτας, πολιτική και θάνατος, πάντα με φόντο την Αλεξάνδρεια του Durrell, που δεν είναι ούτε ακριβώς αυτή του χάρτη, ούτε ακριβώς αυτή του Καβάφη, μια ποίηση σε λόγο πεζό που αιωρείται πάνω από την πόλη και τις δοσοληψίες των ανθρώπων.
Κλέα ⭐⭐⭐⭐
Τελευταίο μέρος του κουαρτέτου, επτά χρόνια αργότερα. Ο Ντάρλει μεγαλώνει την κόρη της Μελίσσα σε ένα ελληνικό νησί, αλλά προλαβαίνει να βρεθεί στην Αλεξάνδρεια για ώστε πόλεμος, φροϋδισμός και κυνισμός να συναντηθούν στην αγαπημένη πόλη, σαν στρώσεις πάνω απόέναν πυρήνα που πάντα είναι η αγάπη. Και η αλήθεια, πολυπρισματική όσο γίνεται αντιληπτή από διαφορετικούς ανθρώπους. παρά το γεγονός ότι το δεύτερο και το τρίτο βιβλίο είναι μάλλον τα "δυνατότερα" του κουαρτέτου, το τελευταίο σίγουρα δεν είναι αδιάφορο.
Is the style overblown at times? Yes. Did I have to make liberal use of Google as a dictionary? Again yes. That said there were moments of sheer brilliance which made up for the author's pretentious style.
The use of varying perspectives was ingenious and really made one think about the nature of human interactions.
Be warned parts of the quartet can be a slog, especially early on whilst getting to grips with the style.
The use of varying perspectives was ingenious and really made one think about the nature of human interactions.
Be warned parts of the quartet can be a slog, especially early on whilst getting to grips with the style.
Content Warnings
Moderate: Racial slurs
I have given it more than 100 pages, but it just isn't holding me. The timing probably isn't right; I might try again another time.
I realized then the truth about all love: that it is an absolute which takes all or forfeits all. The other feelings, compassion, tenderness and so on, exist only on the periphery and belong on the constructions of society and habit.
My gratitude for M.J. Nicholls remains at the fore of this celebration. It wasn't he that steered me to this massive work. I am honestly unable to gather any of MJNs inferences in the direction of Durrell. It was more Nicholls' esprit, that laudable expansion on what we talk about when we review books on GR. Nietzsche started this ball rolling, waxing loudly that there are not facts, but only interpretations. This leads us gleaming into the vortex of Durrell's 4D (apologies to Sherman and Peabody) tetralogy, one name, one face, one book for each dimension in that dotty quantum way.
We begin at the End. The End, mind you, only of an Affair. There is something greasy and squeamish about this, much like Greene's masterpiece. Bendrix and Darley deserve each other, but before one can Blitz the Casbah, the threads separate and the emphasis chugs along at a different angle, involving other souls. Some dead, others despairing. There is a dank musk of incest here. This theme finds a bizarre counterpoint throughout.
The novel Balthazar takes the premise of Justine -- foreigners behaving badly in the ancient city -- and extrapolates it with an unknown resonance. A History worthy of Foucault is forming midway through the second novel. Darley/Durrell is establishing a "great interlinear" a hypertext with contradicting testimony interspersed in his own account.
Montolive is my favorite of the set and a likely zenith for Durrell's ambition. The title character is a diplomat whose own troubled passion vibrates the relations of all the other characters, even as War looms on the horizon. The poems of Cavafy haunt the crackling descriptions of the feverish Egypt of the 1930s. This is a lost city buried under Islamic nationalism and a modern legacy of defeat and corruption.
The Quartet clambers to halt in Clea, by far the weakest novel of the series. The necessary throes of Darley and Clea felt so contrived that I have trouble even thinking calmly about it now. What does remain placid is my memories of the book as object. I bought a hardcovered boxed set of the Quartet 20 years ago and attempted several times to find purchase in its opening pages. This was to avail. Last fall while hobbling about on a sore knee in Berlin, I went with my wife to an English Language second hand book shop just off of Karl Marx Allee. It is more pathetic than romantic to see an American limping about abroad with his hands full of snobby novels. Thus I am guilty.
My gratitude for M.J. Nicholls remains at the fore of this celebration. It wasn't he that steered me to this massive work. I am honestly unable to gather any of MJNs inferences in the direction of Durrell. It was more Nicholls' esprit, that laudable expansion on what we talk about when we review books on GR. Nietzsche started this ball rolling, waxing loudly that there are not facts, but only interpretations. This leads us gleaming into the vortex of Durrell's 4D (apologies to Sherman and Peabody) tetralogy, one name, one face, one book for each dimension in that dotty quantum way.
We begin at the End. The End, mind you, only of an Affair. There is something greasy and squeamish about this, much like Greene's masterpiece. Bendrix and Darley deserve each other, but before one can Blitz the Casbah, the threads separate and the emphasis chugs along at a different angle, involving other souls. Some dead, others despairing. There is a dank musk of incest here. This theme finds a bizarre counterpoint throughout.
The novel Balthazar takes the premise of Justine -- foreigners behaving badly in the ancient city -- and extrapolates it with an unknown resonance. A History worthy of Foucault is forming midway through the second novel. Darley/Durrell is establishing a "great interlinear" a hypertext with contradicting testimony interspersed in his own account.
Montolive is my favorite of the set and a likely zenith for Durrell's ambition. The title character is a diplomat whose own troubled passion vibrates the relations of all the other characters, even as War looms on the horizon. The poems of Cavafy haunt the crackling descriptions of the feverish Egypt of the 1930s. This is a lost city buried under Islamic nationalism and a modern legacy of defeat and corruption.
The Quartet clambers to halt in Clea, by far the weakest novel of the series. The necessary throes of Darley and Clea felt so contrived that I have trouble even thinking calmly about it now. What does remain placid is my memories of the book as object. I bought a hardcovered boxed set of the Quartet 20 years ago and attempted several times to find purchase in its opening pages. This was to avail. Last fall while hobbling about on a sore knee in Berlin, I went with my wife to an English Language second hand book shop just off of Karl Marx Allee. It is more pathetic than romantic to see an American limping about abroad with his hands full of snobby novels. Thus I am guilty.
challenging
emotional
mysterious
reflective
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Strong character development:
Complicated
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
No
Lawrence Durrell is a master wordsmith, capable of making literary music with his ornate and lofty sentences. His most celebrated achievement is the series of four novels titled "The Alexandria Quartet". Each of the books is a layer of a puzzle that can be only understood when reading the whole series, thus making any assessment of individual instalments a futile act. Criticising the complete work in its turn exposes the preferences of the reader.
"The Alexandria Quartet" opens up with "Justine". Its eponymous character is the lover of the fictional novelist narrating the novel. Their love affair set in 1930s Alexandria is an open secret that provides a platform to explore the colonial society running the city and a mechanism to meet a varied set of individuals intimately. We get plunged into a puzzle that seems to offer no narrative direction nor any emotional or intellectual motive. The events and the characters are interwoven into a literary web that resembles more of an exercise in style rather than genuine connection.
When we reach "Balthasar", we start to learn of Durrell's attempt at dealing with relativity in literature. Upon reading the fictional manuscript of "Justine", Balthasar, the homosexual doctor in Alexandria, provides his alternate views on the characters and events to Darley, the previously unnamed author. Filled with an abundance of aphorisms and a language too similar to that of the previous narrator, this attempt, albeit commendable, leads to further accentuate the heavy reliance on style over genuine literary concerns.
The third novel, "Mountolive", named after the British ambassador stationed in Alexandria, and narrated fully in the third person, is Durrell's own vision of composing literature. Perhaps, as the only instalment that can live independently of the series, the work focuses more in trying to understand the complex political life in Egypt in the interbellum than on the personal intrigues between Darley, Justine, her husband Nessim, the prostitute bearing his child Melissa who is also Darley's other lover, Balthasar and his male conquests, and many others. The move towards the political provides a spectrum of rational engagement, but ultimately Durrell is a romantic author, and the matters of the heart soon come to overshadow the plot. Mountolive's own love affair with Nessim's mother and Nessim's brother's unrequited obsession with an artist named Clea seem to expand on the sexual diversity of the previous two novels.
By the time we reach "Clea", we are more impatient to finish the series than give much interest to the plethora of characters and their broken passions. The novel forces couplings that add little to the overall narrative, moreover contradicting yet again the facts exposed previously.
For all of its linguistic brilliance, in its nearly 900 pages, "The Alexandria Quartet" is a meandering mess. The praise generated from the stylistic attempt at meta-narrative is sadly lacking any philosophical or emotional consistency. If Durrell made a satire on the state of literature and its development at the time of writing, then the constant musings have little conceptual integrity. If this should be read as an exploration of sex in the modern world, especially given the numerous references to Marquis de Sade, then the completist variation of all types sexual relations expose more of a concern with science rather than literature.
This series is undoubtedly unique in its structure and it has much to be admired in terms of themes. Its failure lies ultimately in its unnecessary verboseness and uninteresting characters. The puzzle is nothing but an open secret for which we lose interest whatsoever. Fiction becomes as trivial as reality, thus defeating the very nature of art. If this is an anti-novel, then as interesting a concept this may appear, it does little to incentivise one's love for literature.
"The Alexandria Quartet" opens up with "Justine". Its eponymous character is the lover of the fictional novelist narrating the novel. Their love affair set in 1930s Alexandria is an open secret that provides a platform to explore the colonial society running the city and a mechanism to meet a varied set of individuals intimately. We get plunged into a puzzle that seems to offer no narrative direction nor any emotional or intellectual motive. The events and the characters are interwoven into a literary web that resembles more of an exercise in style rather than genuine connection.
When we reach "Balthasar", we start to learn of Durrell's attempt at dealing with relativity in literature. Upon reading the fictional manuscript of "Justine", Balthasar, the homosexual doctor in Alexandria, provides his alternate views on the characters and events to Darley, the previously unnamed author. Filled with an abundance of aphorisms and a language too similar to that of the previous narrator, this attempt, albeit commendable, leads to further accentuate the heavy reliance on style over genuine literary concerns.
The third novel, "Mountolive", named after the British ambassador stationed in Alexandria, and narrated fully in the third person, is Durrell's own vision of composing literature. Perhaps, as the only instalment that can live independently of the series, the work focuses more in trying to understand the complex political life in Egypt in the interbellum than on the personal intrigues between Darley, Justine, her husband Nessim, the prostitute bearing his child Melissa who is also Darley's other lover, Balthasar and his male conquests, and many others. The move towards the political provides a spectrum of rational engagement, but ultimately Durrell is a romantic author, and the matters of the heart soon come to overshadow the plot. Mountolive's own love affair with Nessim's mother and Nessim's brother's unrequited obsession with an artist named Clea seem to expand on the sexual diversity of the previous two novels.
By the time we reach "Clea", we are more impatient to finish the series than give much interest to the plethora of characters and their broken passions. The novel forces couplings that add little to the overall narrative, moreover contradicting yet again the facts exposed previously.
For all of its linguistic brilliance, in its nearly 900 pages, "The Alexandria Quartet" is a meandering mess. The praise generated from the stylistic attempt at meta-narrative is sadly lacking any philosophical or emotional consistency. If Durrell made a satire on the state of literature and its development at the time of writing, then the constant musings have little conceptual integrity. If this should be read as an exploration of sex in the modern world, especially given the numerous references to Marquis de Sade, then the completist variation of all types sexual relations expose more of a concern with science rather than literature.
This series is undoubtedly unique in its structure and it has much to be admired in terms of themes. Its failure lies ultimately in its unnecessary verboseness and uninteresting characters. The puzzle is nothing but an open secret for which we lose interest whatsoever. Fiction becomes as trivial as reality, thus defeating the very nature of art. If this is an anti-novel, then as interesting a concept this may appear, it does little to incentivise one's love for literature.
When I read the last words of Clea, I was disappointed. Disappointed because the story ended and because I had to leave Alexandria. Durrell describes it with such great passion and tenderness, that during some passages I was moved and almost teary-eyed. The glimmering sea, dusty streets, hedonistic carnivals, Arabic quarters... All that refused to leave my mind alone whenever I had to stop reading, due to boring everyday necessities. The four books gradually reveal the stories of Alexandria's people, those who are changed by the city. Despite however macabre their fates might be, Durrell's writing makes it seem beautiful and maybe slightly melancholic. All of their lives are tangled up in a huge web that spreads over Egypt and which is a catalyst for the events, events that represent the difficulty of loving someone, in all forms possible.
dark
emotional
mysterious
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
Fascinating historical period and location. Very compelling characters. I found the story confusing at first, hard to make sense of but once I started to get it I could hardly put it down.
A lengthy and fulsome read, each page packed full. The work of literary genius, but perhaps, I would, of it’s time. I can’t imagine I would have got much from this as a younger reader, it took the life experience to get my head round it.