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nigellicus's review against another edition
5.0
One noticeable negative effect of using an online cataloguing social media service like this here Goodreads is a tendency to attach more value to numbers than to books themselves. Thus, I am mildly obsessed by the numbers of books read per year, by the number of pages read per year, by the 'most-read authors' and by the various sub-categories of the books I read. This isn't all bad of course. Being aware of how many books I read helps keep me focused on reading more books and spending less time foostering online. It encourages me to read more non-fiction and helped me notice the overwhelming maleness of the authors I read and helps me push myself outside my comfort zone and challenge myself a little
Unfortunately, there's a tendency to look at books and decide they're too damn long, too damn dense, too damn hard, I'll be a month or more reading that, it'll bring down my total, better to read something short and fast and easy. This is particularly bad when it comes to collected or omnibus editions, like the Gormenghast trilogy which I've tried a few times to start but give up because it's just going to take too damn long and after all that time it'll only count as one book! Or this very Quartet, which I put off for weeks before diving in. The numbers shouldn't matter more than the books, of course, but sometimes they do, and that's something to be overcome.
The Alexandria Quartet consists of, yes, four novels, all set in the titular North African city in the late thirties early forties. In fact, the first three cover the same time period, more or less, and provide seperate glosses on the same events - even if the events themselves are not depicted in the book, they are altered by new information. Then in the third novel, 'the time dimension is unleashed,' and yes Durrell can get away with saying stuff like that and, indeed, with doing stuff like that.
A group of remarkably self-involved, pretentious, priveleged, post-colonial avatars fall in and out of love with each other, have affairs, enact betrayals and deceptions, analyse themselves and their histories and their relationships with with rare articulacy and poetic prolixity. They discuss art and poetry and literature and all around them the city and its environs are described with astonishing vigour and extraordinary language. They break up, commit suicide or die or go into exile, and that's the first book, Justine, a concentrated non-linear burst of almost impressionistic intensity. Balthazar interleaves new accounts, new insights structured as threads which intertwine with Justine, altering our perceptions, deepening our understanding, but quietly mocking our presumption that there can be full and complete and singular understandings.
Mountolive steps back and above the previous two, almost conventional in plot and structure, creating a political backdrop which further contextualises, confuses and contradicts the first two volumes. Finally Clea lurches like its narrator back to the city and on through the war - and, in a series not short of passages of dazzling literary dexterity, contains the highlight of a description of a bombing raid seen from offshore. Stories continue and develop, the nature of love is further explored, the dead from Justine continue to intrude with galling insights, comic hilarity and esoteric explorations. It ends with notes that point to future volumes never to be written but which exist as part of the vast thrumming life-energy of the Quartet that seems to sprawl across unwritten histories.
Beautiful and vital, complex and ambitious, funny and horrible, this is an astonishing, dazzling, deeply enriching work of literature.
Such a pity it only counts as one book.
Unfortunately, there's a tendency to look at books and decide they're too damn long, too damn dense, too damn hard, I'll be a month or more reading that, it'll bring down my total, better to read something short and fast and easy. This is particularly bad when it comes to collected or omnibus editions, like the Gormenghast trilogy which I've tried a few times to start but give up because it's just going to take too damn long and after all that time it'll only count as one book! Or this very Quartet, which I put off for weeks before diving in. The numbers shouldn't matter more than the books, of course, but sometimes they do, and that's something to be overcome.
The Alexandria Quartet consists of, yes, four novels, all set in the titular North African city in the late thirties early forties. In fact, the first three cover the same time period, more or less, and provide seperate glosses on the same events - even if the events themselves are not depicted in the book, they are altered by new information. Then in the third novel, 'the time dimension is unleashed,' and yes Durrell can get away with saying stuff like that and, indeed, with doing stuff like that.
A group of remarkably self-involved, pretentious, priveleged, post-colonial avatars fall in and out of love with each other, have affairs, enact betrayals and deceptions, analyse themselves and their histories and their relationships with with rare articulacy and poetic prolixity. They discuss art and poetry and literature and all around them the city and its environs are described with astonishing vigour and extraordinary language. They break up, commit suicide or die or go into exile, and that's the first book, Justine, a concentrated non-linear burst of almost impressionistic intensity. Balthazar interleaves new accounts, new insights structured as threads which intertwine with Justine, altering our perceptions, deepening our understanding, but quietly mocking our presumption that there can be full and complete and singular understandings.
Mountolive steps back and above the previous two, almost conventional in plot and structure, creating a political backdrop which further contextualises, confuses and contradicts the first two volumes. Finally Clea lurches like its narrator back to the city and on through the war - and, in a series not short of passages of dazzling literary dexterity, contains the highlight of a description of a bombing raid seen from offshore. Stories continue and develop, the nature of love is further explored, the dead from Justine continue to intrude with galling insights, comic hilarity and esoteric explorations. It ends with notes that point to future volumes never to be written but which exist as part of the vast thrumming life-energy of the Quartet that seems to sprawl across unwritten histories.
Beautiful and vital, complex and ambitious, funny and horrible, this is an astonishing, dazzling, deeply enriching work of literature.
Such a pity it only counts as one book.
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