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ericjaysonnenscheinwriter2392's review
4.0
BALTHAZAR: A BRIDGE TO MANY ISLANDS
In The Alexandria Quartet, "Balthazar" is like "The Two Towers" in "The Lord of the Rings." It is connective, rather than hermetic, a bridge between the other books, and an elaboration and commentary on Justine rather a stand-alone volume. This may explain why it took a long time to complete it. It was interesting and full of Durrell’s luxuriant prose, yet I was able to put it down because it was more like an anthology of anecdotes providing context and ornamentation to the world of Alexandria than a coherent story with narrative momentum leading to a satisfying ending.
Lawrence Durrell's concept of a "word continuum" which applied Einstein's theory of relativity to fiction, permits a non-linear story-telling. There is no one particular arc. Vignettes and plot points can move back and forth because ultimately time is as relative as truth. Ultimately, Durrell's primary objective is not to tell one protagonist's story or the saga of a circle of friends moving through time—although the characters ultimately age, go through vicissitudes and move through time. His main project in this series of novels is to challenge and provide an alternative to our conventional notion of truth—and time—as unitary and absolute. Meanwhile his protagonist turns out to be not a single human character, but the place where human characters love, banter, agonize and intrigue—Alexandria, Egypt.
Durrell was very candid about this proclivity. In his essay "Landscape and Character" (1960) he wrote, "I willingly admit to seeing 'characters' almost as functions of a landscape..." Later he writes, "so...a Spain, an Italy, a Greece...will express itself through a human just as it does through its wild flowers..."
Perhaps the meandering and unstructured presentation of Balthazar is intended to parallel the moral relativism, sophistication, lubriciousness and world weariness of Alexandria, the much conquered, much compromised metropolis at the crossroads of so many civilizations. This book starts as an "interlinear"-a cross-examination and revision of what Darley, the hapless and romantic narrator-agent of Justine believed to be true about the promiscuous and beautiful Justine and their elite circle of friends.
Whereas Justine is Darley's story, told from the partial and unreliable perspective of an impecunious foreigner and outsider, Balthazar is a counter-narrative told by the consummate Alexandrian insider. Balthazar is a well-connected physician and Cabalist who is also the city's medical examiner and privy to all of the city's grisly secrets. His goal is to enlighten Darley by disabusing him of his romantic illusions. In the process, Balthazar evicts Darley from the center of the narrative to the edge of it. Balthazar thus opens the Alexandria Quartet in various directions. It is no longer a "bildungsroman" in which a principal character debouches from a series of tests to a new awareness or life status. It will henceforth be about a universe of characters whose fates somehow mirror or relate to each other, without resolving each other.
Ultimately, all creative writing projects are experiments. Writers seek the optimal way to express themselves. In the process they depend on old conventions or break from them—or devise their own methods piecemeal, ending up with a Rauschenberg-like mélange of diverse techniques and effects, until they convey their vision in their own particular style.
The Alexandria Quartet was a narrative experiment. It was the writer Durrell's attempt to tell the only kind of novel he could write or wished to write—one in which characters are exponents of where they live, its landscape and its cultural features.
However, Durrell’s innovation comes with artistic risk. As exponents of a place, rather than as free agents shaping their own fates with their own decisions and actions, the characters of Balthazar may seem, despite the ornate descriptions, provocative attitudes and fanciful storylines the author bestows on them, to lack the agency and independence to make them real and relatable. While Alexandria emerges as the principal and only fully developed character, the characters that populate it, though colorful, active and full of thoughts and attitudes, become less granular and solid, more mythic and abstract, not performers but performances. Their worldly activities—betrayal, murder, adultery, bribery and deception—seem symbolic and weightless. They are literary effects, rather than figures causing effect.
In the end, even the city of Alexandria, the protagonist of the piece, makes a symbolic impression. It is not revealed as an actual metropolis, an historical palimpsest where civilizations, conquests and events left their residues and where people of all social strata continue to lead lives. It never comes into focus as a place on a map with its own quiddity, but as a metaphorical placeholder for the author’s musings and preoccupations, a hypothetical lost-and-found for his psyche.
Near the end of Balthazar one of the pivotal characters, the literary genius Pursewarden, describes the literary process in this way:
"In my art, through my art, I want really to achieve myself shedding the work, which is of no importance, as a snake sheds its skin. Perhaps that's why writers at heart want to be loved for their work rather than for themselves..." Balthazar stands as part of the creative process by which Durrell achieved himself. Only the reader can judge how well he succeeded at producing a satisfying artistic effect.
In The Alexandria Quartet, "Balthazar" is like "The Two Towers" in "The Lord of the Rings." It is connective, rather than hermetic, a bridge between the other books, and an elaboration and commentary on Justine rather a stand-alone volume. This may explain why it took a long time to complete it. It was interesting and full of Durrell’s luxuriant prose, yet I was able to put it down because it was more like an anthology of anecdotes providing context and ornamentation to the world of Alexandria than a coherent story with narrative momentum leading to a satisfying ending.
Lawrence Durrell's concept of a "word continuum" which applied Einstein's theory of relativity to fiction, permits a non-linear story-telling. There is no one particular arc. Vignettes and plot points can move back and forth because ultimately time is as relative as truth. Ultimately, Durrell's primary objective is not to tell one protagonist's story or the saga of a circle of friends moving through time—although the characters ultimately age, go through vicissitudes and move through time. His main project in this series of novels is to challenge and provide an alternative to our conventional notion of truth—and time—as unitary and absolute. Meanwhile his protagonist turns out to be not a single human character, but the place where human characters love, banter, agonize and intrigue—Alexandria, Egypt.
Durrell was very candid about this proclivity. In his essay "Landscape and Character" (1960) he wrote, "I willingly admit to seeing 'characters' almost as functions of a landscape..." Later he writes, "so...a Spain, an Italy, a Greece...will express itself through a human just as it does through its wild flowers..."
Perhaps the meandering and unstructured presentation of Balthazar is intended to parallel the moral relativism, sophistication, lubriciousness and world weariness of Alexandria, the much conquered, much compromised metropolis at the crossroads of so many civilizations. This book starts as an "interlinear"-a cross-examination and revision of what Darley, the hapless and romantic narrator-agent of Justine believed to be true about the promiscuous and beautiful Justine and their elite circle of friends.
Whereas Justine is Darley's story, told from the partial and unreliable perspective of an impecunious foreigner and outsider, Balthazar is a counter-narrative told by the consummate Alexandrian insider. Balthazar is a well-connected physician and Cabalist who is also the city's medical examiner and privy to all of the city's grisly secrets. His goal is to enlighten Darley by disabusing him of his romantic illusions. In the process, Balthazar evicts Darley from the center of the narrative to the edge of it. Balthazar thus opens the Alexandria Quartet in various directions. It is no longer a "bildungsroman" in which a principal character debouches from a series of tests to a new awareness or life status. It will henceforth be about a universe of characters whose fates somehow mirror or relate to each other, without resolving each other.
Ultimately, all creative writing projects are experiments. Writers seek the optimal way to express themselves. In the process they depend on old conventions or break from them—or devise their own methods piecemeal, ending up with a Rauschenberg-like mélange of diverse techniques and effects, until they convey their vision in their own particular style.
The Alexandria Quartet was a narrative experiment. It was the writer Durrell's attempt to tell the only kind of novel he could write or wished to write—one in which characters are exponents of where they live, its landscape and its cultural features.
However, Durrell’s innovation comes with artistic risk. As exponents of a place, rather than as free agents shaping their own fates with their own decisions and actions, the characters of Balthazar may seem, despite the ornate descriptions, provocative attitudes and fanciful storylines the author bestows on them, to lack the agency and independence to make them real and relatable. While Alexandria emerges as the principal and only fully developed character, the characters that populate it, though colorful, active and full of thoughts and attitudes, become less granular and solid, more mythic and abstract, not performers but performances. Their worldly activities—betrayal, murder, adultery, bribery and deception—seem symbolic and weightless. They are literary effects, rather than figures causing effect.
In the end, even the city of Alexandria, the protagonist of the piece, makes a symbolic impression. It is not revealed as an actual metropolis, an historical palimpsest where civilizations, conquests and events left their residues and where people of all social strata continue to lead lives. It never comes into focus as a place on a map with its own quiddity, but as a metaphorical placeholder for the author’s musings and preoccupations, a hypothetical lost-and-found for his psyche.
Near the end of Balthazar one of the pivotal characters, the literary genius Pursewarden, describes the literary process in this way:
"In my art, through my art, I want really to achieve myself shedding the work, which is of no importance, as a snake sheds its skin. Perhaps that's why writers at heart want to be loved for their work rather than for themselves..." Balthazar stands as part of the creative process by which Durrell achieved himself. Only the reader can judge how well he succeeded at producing a satisfying artistic effect.
sethlynch's review
5.0
Not as good as Justine but and enjoyable read which added some nice twists to Justine
pavram's review
4.0
Ono što mi je malo škripalo kod Baltazara je narativa, ili radije, njena neubedljivost. Darelova ideja primene relativiteta (mada malo laička) na strukturu kvarteta jeste zanimljiva – na neki način svaki potonji deo je ponovo čitanje jednog istog romana, ali sa različitim predznanjem – ali istovremeno unosi i sumnju u autentičnost pisanja, posebno kada karakteristično prvo lice iz Justine neretko zameni trećim licem nekog tamo nezanimljivog lika (npr. Nesimov brat). Dodaj na to što sam očekivao više hermetizma, i to je i dalje dobar roman koji samostalno stoji vrlo, vrlo dobro – ali u kontekstu nastavka Justine, tojest kvarteta u celosti, malo manjka.
4
4
merixien's review against another edition
5.0
Justine’in hikayesi, bu kitaptaki Balthazar’ın anlattıklarıyla daha bir yerine oturmaya başlıyor. Bundan olsa gerek, Balthazar’ı daha çok sevdim. Bilmediğiniz detayları öğrendikçe ve karakterleri daha iyi tanıdıkça hikayenin içine daha çok çekiliyor insan. Seriyi okumaya devam edeceğim ve ilk kitaptan beri en çok merak ettiğim karakter de kitap da son kitapta düğümleri çözülecek olan Clea.
bobbo49's review
4.0
Second volume of the Quartet. The story told in Justine takes a curious turn, as Balthazar (and then other characters) provide the narrator/writer Darley with different perspectives, insights and interpretations of his original perceptions of the realities of the relationships and events detailed in the first volume. Durrell's writing is classical and beautifully descriptive as he recreates the world of high society in Alexandria of the 1930s.
metaphorosis's review against another edition
2.0
reviews.metaphorosis.com
2 stars
"Must I now rework my own experiences in order to come to the heart of the truth?"
Unfortunately, the answer seems to be ‘Yes’.
I came to the first volume of this quartet, Justine, with a fair degree of enthusiasm. I quickly lost that after bogging down in that book's mire of reflections layered on philosophy on reminiscence on memory. Justine became an agonizing test of endurance and will, as I constantly checked just how much more of a slog each chapter would be.
It was therefore with trepidation that I approached this second book, Balthazar. I had understood that each of the first three books told essentially the same story, from a different perspective. This device has worked for others (recently, for Orson Scott Card with his Shadow series), and it's an interesting idea. Plus, I had done the hard work of piecing together the story in Justine. In short, I had hope.
That hope soon dissipated, blown away by a relentless storm of overwrought images, inapposite metaphors, and languid introspection. In Balthazar, we hear from the titular character only indirectly, via his comments to the protagonist about the manuscript of Justine. Balthazar, a fairly minor character in Justine, now suddenly becomes a key figure in all of its events, and a source of undisputed truth.
We learn that the core concepts and relationships of Justine were false, and the narrator spends endless pages dissecting and redissecting his memories. Worst of all is his endless discussion of the re-evaluation itself. If the first book was chaotic and complex, this is simply long and almost unbearably tedious. It's not particularly difficult to follow (though several brand new characters are suddenly shown to have always been on stage), but it is also not particularly interesting. To be blunt, it was not just dull, but tiring - not quite as hard to get through as Justine, but just as self-involved. Durrell shows from time to time that he has a sense of humor, but he steadfastly refuses to use it.
And then the book just stops. Durrell inserts a mildly mysterious crime or accident, but it seems designed more to provide some sort of climax than to actually fit the story.
Throughout the book, the narrator's view of the past, and perhaps the past itself, are irrevocably changed by Balthazar's revelations. Yet not only were the revelations themselves not very credible, the narrator's reactions to these bombshells were distant, as if the woman he had been so obsessed with had suddenly become a figure of history - though he tells us this is not so.
I give credit to Durrell for an ambitious effort, and for his courage in experimentation. The concept - re-evaluating years' long relationships in the light of new information - had promise. Some of his description is very effective, some of the phrases memorable ("I love the French edition with its uncut pages. I would not want a reader too lazy to use a knife on me.", "In a book of poems: 'One to be taken from time to time as needed and allowed to dissolve in the mind.' "). But overall, the book sags under the sheer weight of monotony, held up by the very thin reed of our interest in the narrator's thoughts.
As with the first book, I cannot recommend this. If you lived in Alexandria in the first half of the last century, it may be of interest. Otherwise, even if you've read Justine, I advise you to stay clear. As for me, well, I bought the quartet, and I'll read it. Only 600 pages to go, and a faint hope that some of them will be better.
ihyuca's review against another edition
4.0
İlk kitabın açamadığım kabuğunu Balthazar şiirden cümleleriyle usul usul kırdı, aynı insanlara bakıyorum güya, oysa bakış değişti- hâlâ giz kalanlar var, ama artık anlamadığıma üzülmüyorum; tüm seri bittiğinde, hatta belki bir sonraki okuyuşlarda varılacak tılsımlar barındırıyor içinde, o yüzden de bu yolculuk daha heyecanlı.
lazygreypanda's review against another edition
emotional
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? No
- Loveable characters? No
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
4.5
mispaintedlady's review
4.0
I like this one so much better than Justine, but you can tell that the author and character have grown since the first of this quartet. There is less neurotic obsession about female sexuality than in Justine, something that read as outdated for me.
This book was rich in details that made you feel like you were in Alexandria. I loved the explorations of friendship vs independent individuals living their own lives with their own secrets.
This book was rich in details that made you feel like you were in Alexandria. I loved the explorations of friendship vs independent individuals living their own lives with their own secrets.
dorthepedersen_reads's review against another edition
4.0
Det er ikke nemt at læse Alexandria-kvartetten! Modsat sin bror (der formidler fremragende underholdning) kræver Lawrence Durrell noget af sin læser: Man er nødt til at SE hvert et ord for at fornemme kvaliteten og dybden, og jeg er sikker på, at også Balthazar er en af de bøger, der skal læses og genlæses flere gange, før man har fået alle aspekter med. Ligesom når man læser Thomas Mann, tager det TID at læse Lawrence Durrell - til gengæld får man en mindeværdig læseoplevelse.