The Alexandria Quartet

A facebook friend , surprised that I had never read Alexandria Quartet recommended it. Well, from the first few pages it brought to mind middlebrow Galsworthy channeling Proust.

I don't mind the impressionistic scenes, can gloss over the exuberant prose and swallow the sometimes silly notions of Justine's sexuality, but when Proust already did it all so masterfully in Recherche [multiple lenses/the memories of others/characters altering through time and time itself] should Quartet be considered a masterpiece or a merely an entertaining pastiche?

Perhaps Durrell ratchets his game up one step by retelling the same story from other perspectives--yet Justine was published seven years after the film Roshomon was released, and thirty five years after the appearance of Ryunosuke Akutagawa's brilliant short story, In a Grove, which inspired it [ if you haven't read this writer yet--you are in for a major treat].

I suppose the 'exotic' Egyptian setting was the draw for post-war readers-and of course that the translation of Proust available at the time is often ponderous. Yet, reading Recherche, for all its difficulties, subtleties and byways is so much more rewarding, since Proust achieves the luminescence Durrell strives for but falls short of.

As for the expat setting, I prefer that other exponent of excess, Malcolm Lowry, and though I read it many years ago, I recommend at least the first book in Naguib Mafouz's Cairo Trilogy--a view of Egypt by an Egyptian master who was also influenced by Proust yet managed to produce something much more original than Durrell did, particularly in his late career.

Maybe I am being too harsh, since I believe all literature builds on its predecessors - yet something isn't quite right here--three and half stars -for effort.

Cloassic litterature. Excellent.

Four books in one volume a bit too much, by two volume would hav been preferable.
I have rerceived the Fucoxantin, tried it before. not efficient.
Have not received yet the other books.

Tried this once in my early twenties. Again in my late thirties. When the Guardian ran its book club last year with the Quartet, I thought I'd give it one more try. Nope. It's as florid now as it was thirty years ago. I kept swinging at the purple prose til I struck out.

I began this 50 years ago in college, because the first book, Justine, reminded me of a girlfriend. Starting over, I forced myself to the finish. Chock full of words you've never heard before and never will again. Hard to follow the story. Boring and pretentious. At least I did it.

First of all let me say that "The Alexandria Quartet" was one of the most moving books I've ever read, when I read it years ago, and so I was looking forward to putting it on my Kindle to have it to read over what is promising to be a really hot summer here in Chicago (this book really reads well during hot weather, I think).

Here's the problem. In the first page or three of the actual book, Durrell throws in a note. It is marked with an asterisk, and you have to turn to about the last page of the book to read the note. On the next page, Durrell does the same thing, an asterisk, and off you go to the back of the book again. There are around ten such notes in the first book "Justine". They are all on a page of notes and referenced by the page number on which the asterisk occurs. This is not a great way to do footnotes (end notes, really) but it works if there aren't a lot of them. However, whoever created this Kindle edition didn't make the footnotes active. DOH! AND there is no active table of contents. DOH! again! That means the reader is going to have to figure out by trial and error where the notes occur. Now, if you have bought each book seperately. This is a minor hassle (although I would argue there shouldn't be ANY hassle when you are paying full price for a Kindle book). You just use the menu to "go to the end" and then page backward until you hit the notes. BUT, if you have bought the one volume edition, does this approach still work? Or do you have to hunt for the one quarter mark of the whole thing and then hunt around some more to find the end of Justine, and then hunt around some more for the notes page? No way do I have time and patience for that.

It may just be me, but it seems to me that if a publisher is going to charge almost $14.00 for a Kindle edition, they ought to make the table of contents active AND make the notes active. There is simply no excuse for not doing at least the latter thing.

So, sadly, I have returned this (citing quality issues) and will simply read the quartet in paperback next time. Too bad!

new edition combining 4 books of Alexandria Quartet. Hoped for 4 individuals as this is heavy for travelling.

In addition, too much margin on left side of pages causing the book to be too tightly bound; Therefore hard to

hold book open.

I am sure Lawrence Durrell received accolades for this book, I am just not sure why. It is so long and so slow that the entire time I am reading I am asking myself why I thought it would be different than when I tried to read it in high school. I admit, I did not finish reading it, so perhaps there is a great ending that ties it all up in a pretty package. But I am now 60 years old and my time is too important to waste it trying to find out.

Durrell's book has an inflated reputation, and time demonstrates that his lush style and multiple points-of-view won't save it from oblivion.

I read it recently after about 30 years, and realize that it's a young person's book, a bad reader's idea of profundity.

T.S. Eliot once puffed THE BLACK BOOK, an earlier work by Durrell, but that novel is unreadable and one wonders what Eliot could possibly have found in it. A "poetic" sensibility, I suppose, but if so, he was badly mistaken. (He also praised Djuna Barnes' NIGHTWOOD, another dubious "prose poem".)

Don't waste money on this boxed set. If you must, read JUSTINE, the first volume, and you'll understand why you shouldn't.

In the late fifties Lawrence Durrell had an interesting idea. Take a single story, but tell it across four different novels with each novel providing slightly different shades of meaning and revelation to the basic tale so that over the course of the series readers would question what they were originally told as more information becomes available and perhaps find their understanding of the proceedings deepening with each successive foray into the exotic world (in this case 1930s Alexandria, Egypt) that he's recreating.

Its the kind of idea that a sucker for ambition like me can fully get behind because I enjoy these literary high wire acts, and not even in the hope of seeing someone fail spectacularly (I set the bar for failure at this kind of thing fairly high) . . . there's something to be said for seeing someone experiment and in that experimentation is what should be a fairly simply format (i.e. words on paper) manage to come up with something that's both intellectually and emotionally compelling. Frankly, the biggest worry I have this kind of thing is that I'll find it more admirable than engrossing, that I'll adore the sheer thought that went into the construction of all these facets but wind up viewing it more like a museum exhibit, where I walk around it slowly, nodding and murmuring to myself without actually being able to connect with what its showing me.

So far, one book in we're veering more toward the "admirable" portion of the spectrum but he has plenty of time to pull this together and hit me in the gut.

The basic premise is a a study of the romantic obsessions and entanglements of a variety of people living in Alexandria, told to us at least somewhat after the fact by one of the points of a love triangle. Told in the first person by an unnamed Irishman we're brought into a world the biggest commodity of the Alexandria markets appears to be Love Potion #9 because it seems like literally everyone is sleeping with everyone else.

Our narrator is with Melissa (who appears to be getting gradually sicker) but has grown increasingly fascinated with Justine, a Jewish woman who is married to Nessim, a local Egyptian Copt businessman. There are more characters populating the city that drift in and out of the narrative and who are sometimes more interesting than the main characters (including a frustrated diplomat, a weird novelist and a cross-dressing police officer) but for the most part the focus is unerringly on the narrator's analysis of his relationship with Justine, who even after the fact seems to obsessively fascinate and mystify him as he tries to delve into the motives of pretty much anything she does. Confused yet?

Its how you feel about this central relationship that's going to make or break the novel for you on an emotional level. Durrell is saved by the fact that he's an excellent writer in the painterly fashion, able to convey vibrant images with effortless flicks of his pen and if this book does nothing else it'll make you want to build a time machine to travel back to dusty, dusky and strange Alexandria. He's one of those writers who comes up with at least one line or passage per page that you want to go back and read again to let the full impact of his word choices sink in. He's not showy about it either but extremely elegant, never overwhelming the reader with fancy descriptions but seemingly thinking about the weight of each line carefully before setting it down. On a pure sensory level the book was an absolute delight to read (it helps that its fairly short).

But whether you'll care about any of the characters is another question. Its one of those books that automatically assumes that because smart people are being sad about their complex love affairs that you'll be as equally obsessed as they are with analyzing every aspect of it. Large chunks of a short book are devoted to our narrator half-mooning, half-assessing just what the heck has happened with his love affairs and trying to understand how you solve a problem like Justine. But while I'm somewhat sympathetic to the wound he's nursing in his heart, he doesn't convey very well why we should be as obsessed with Justine as he is. She mostly exists to be an object of desire for both the narrator and Nessim, a mysterious woman with a mysterious past prone to saying mysterious things and while that's interesting it doesn't give me a reason to unravel her mysteries myself (as if to press the "she's meaningful!" point home, we get excerpts from a novel written by one of her former lovers that contains many passages specifically about her, which you will either find intriguing or manipulative literary trickery).

The book does liven up when other characters appear that don't have anything to do with the mystery of "Why is Justine so alluring and so unreachable?", if only because it gives the narrator an excuse to stop moping for five minutes and focus on conveying a story. Both Balthazar and Clea have personalities and histories ripe for dissection (and later books do more focus on them), and the hints we get of other happenings on the sociopolitical level suggest there may be going on that the narrator doesn't quite realize but a lot of that flashes by, washed away in the constant waves of "Justine, whhhyyy?"

With a triangle and ancillary involved characters, there's ample opportunity for us to watch the inevitable gears of tragedy lock into place but with the temperature never rising above a cool simmer we're watching the distant rendition of clamped down emotions of repressed people, like hearing a heavy metal concert buried under a mile of cotton. Maybe you can feel the thud, maybe its just your own heartbeat. A late in the story hunt has elements of paranoia and questions of who knows what but its hard to feel the bristling menace of the city or even get the sense that people are eventually going to get what's coming to them (or even suffer consequences they don't deserve). A narrative like this seems to depend more on people being caught up in letting events and actions control them, or by making a variety of well-thought out but wrong decisions at the exact wrong time. In Ford Maddox Ford's "The Good Soldier" it worked brilliantly (and even uses Durrell's technique of organizing the narrative based on memory more than a linear progression of events), because he was able to convey the tragic waste of his privileged characters, and the scorched earth nature of it. Here, if you strip away the exotic nature of the locale you're left with a soap opera that may have read more shocking decades ago where the idea of otherwise intelligent people engaging in this kind of behavior and then being elegantly tortured about it later through endless ruminating might have been new and different. Now it just seems like rich and smart people subjected to problems of their own devising and then asking us to sympathize with how bad they feel about it. The writing alone makes it worth visiting and there's more than enough talent on display to suggest that Durrell will be able to do exactly what he wants over the course of the quartet so all these criticisms may be addressed in the long run. But beyond the setting and the sheer genius of the prose there's very little that lingers here under all the layers of allusions and symbolism he's heaping on the narrative. Like the wispy song once said, its beautiful, but it doesn't mean that much to me.

Durrell's book has an inflated reputation, and time demonstrates that his lush style and multiple points-of-view won't save it from oblivion.

I read it recently after about 30 years, and realize that it's a young person's book, a bad reader's idea of profundity.

T.S. Eliot once puffed THE BLACK BOOK, an earlier work by Durrell, but that novel is unreadable and one wonders what Eliot could possibly have found in it. A "poetic" sensibility, I suppose, but if so, he was badly mistaken. (He also praised Djuna Barnes' NIGHTWOOD, another dubious "prose poem".)

Don't waste money on this boxed set. If you must, read JUSTINE, the first volume, and you'll understand why you shouldn't.

In the late fifties Lawrence Durrell had an interesting idea. Take a single story, but tell it across four different novels with each novel providing slightly different shades of meaning and revelation to the basic tale so that over the course of the series readers would question what they were originally told as more information becomes available and perhaps find their understanding of the proceedings deepening with each successive foray into the exotic world (in this case 1930s Alexandria, Egypt) that he's recreating.

Its the kind of idea that a sucker for ambition like me can fully get behind because I enjoy these literary high wire acts, and not even in the hope of seeing someone fail spectacularly (I set the bar for failure at this kind of thing fairly high) . . . there's something to be said for seeing someone experiment and in that experimentation is what should be a fairly simply format (i.e. words on paper) manage to come up with something that's both intellectually and emotionally compelling. Frankly, the biggest worry I have this kind of thing is that I'll find it more admirable than engrossing, that I'll adore the sheer thought that went into the construction of all these facets but wind up viewing it more like a museum exhibit, where I walk around it slowly, nodding and murmuring to myself without actually being able to connect with what its showing me.

So far, one book in we're veering more toward the "admirable" portion of the spectrum but he has plenty of time to pull this together and hit me in the gut.

The basic premise is a a study of the romantic obsessions and entanglements of a variety of people living in Alexandria, told to us at least somewhat after the fact by one of the points of a love triangle. Told in the first person by an unnamed Irishman we're brought into a world the biggest commodity of the Alexandria markets appears to be Love Potion #9 because it seems like literally everyone is sleeping with everyone else.

Our narrator is with Melissa (who appears to be getting gradually sicker) but has grown increasingly fascinated with Justine, a Jewish woman who is married to Nessim, a local Egyptian Copt businessman. There are more characters populating the city that drift in and out of the narrative and who are sometimes more interesting than the main characters (including a frustrated diplomat, a weird novelist and a cross-dressing police officer) but for the most part the focus is unerringly on the narrator's analysis of his relationship with Justine, who even after the fact seems to obsessively fascinate and mystify him as he tries to delve into the motives of pretty much anything she does. Confused yet?

Its how you feel about this central relationship that's going to make or break the novel for you on an emotional level. Durrell is saved by the fact that he's an excellent writer in the painterly fashion, able to convey vibrant images with effortless flicks of his pen and if this book does nothing else it'll make you want to build a time machine to travel back to dusty, dusky and strange Alexandria. He's one of those writers who comes up with at least one line or passage per page that you want to go back and read again to let the full impact of his word choices sink in. He's not showy about it either but extremely elegant, never overwhelming the reader with fancy descriptions but seemingly thinking about the weight of each line carefully before setting it down. On a pure sensory level the book was an absolute delight to read (it helps that its fairly short).

But whether you'll care about any of the characters is another question. Its one of those books that automatically assumes that because smart people are being sad about their complex love affairs that you'll be as equally obsessed as they are with analyzing every aspect of it. Large chunks of a short book are devoted to our narrator half-mooning, half-assessing just what the heck has happened with his love affairs and trying to understand how you solve a problem like Justine. But while I'm somewhat sympathetic to the wound he's nursing in his heart, he doesn't convey very well why we should be as obsessed with Justine as he is. She mostly exists to be an object of desire for both the narrator and Nessim, a mysterious woman with a mysterious past prone to saying mysterious things and while that's interesting it doesn't give me a reason to unravel her mysteries myself (as if to press the "she's meaningful!" point home, we get excerpts from a novel written by one of her former lovers that contains many passages specifically about her, which you will either find intriguing or manipulative literary trickery).

The book does liven up when other characters appear that don't have anything to do with the mystery of "Why is Justine so alluring and so unreachable?", if only because it gives the narrator an excuse to stop moping for five minutes and focus on conveying a story. Both Balthazar and Clea have personalities and histories ripe for dissection (and later books do more focus on them), and the hints we get of other happenings on the sociopolitical level suggest there may be going on that the narrator doesn't quite realize but a lot of that flashes by, washed away in the constant waves of "Justine, whhhyyy?"

With a triangle and ancillary involved characters, there's ample opportunity for us to watch the inevitable gears of tragedy lock into place but with the temperature never rising above a cool simmer we're watching the distant rendition of clamped down emotions of repressed people, like hearing a heavy metal concert buried under a mile of cotton. Maybe you can feel the thud, maybe its just your own heartbeat. A late in the story hunt has elements of paranoia and questions of who knows what but its hard to feel the bristling menace of the city or even get the sense that people are eventually going to get what's coming to them (or even suffer consequences they don't deserve). A narrative like this seems to depend more on people being caught up in letting events and actions control them, or by making a variety of well-thought out but wrong decisions at the exact wrong time. In Ford Maddox Ford's "The Good Soldier" it worked brilliantly (and even uses Durrell's technique of organizing the narrative based on memory more than a linear progression of events), because he was able to convey the tragic waste of his privileged characters, and the scorched earth nature of it. Here, if you strip away the exotic nature of the locale you're left with a soap opera that may have read more shocking decades ago where the idea of otherwise intelligent people engaging in this kind of behavior and then being elegantly tortured about it later through endless ruminating might have been new and different. Now it just seems like rich and smart people subjected to problems of their own devising and then asking us to sympathize with how bad they feel about it. The writing alone makes it worth visiting and there's more than enough talent on display to suggest that Durrell will be able to do exactly what he wants over the course of the quartet so all these criticisms may be addressed in the long run. But beyond the setting and the sheer genius of the prose there's very little that lingers here under all the layers of allusions and symbolism he's heaping on the narrative. Like the wispy song once said, its beautiful, but it doesn't mean that much to me.

The blurbs on this volume give the game away: the notices (one from Newsweek and one from the long-defunct New York Herald Tribune) date from its release a half-century or so ago. Indeed, the Alexandria Quartet hasn't aged well, but between its puerile conceits and purple prose, I find it hard to believe it was ever well received. (I asked an older friend how it had managed to gain a reputation and he attributed its success to the boredom of the late 50s. "Could that explain Mailer too?" quipped another friend of mine.) I was drawn to the Quartet because I was intrigued by its structure: four volumes recounting roughly the same events from four different perspectives employing various narratorial devices. Also, as a fan of Proust, the promised psychological approach and, yes, lurid subject matter appealed to me. But 70 pages in, stuck in a novel-within-a-novel even worse than the actual one, I couldn't bear it anymore. If you're thinking of buying this book, read the opening paragraphs, with their multiple ellipses and exclamation points, to give you a taste of what you'd be in for. If you're in the mood for a multivolume meditation on love and friendship that vividly depicts a time and place--and is witty to boot--check out Anthony Powell's A Dance to the Music of Time or the big guy, Proust himself.

This third book of The Alexandria Quartet is quite different from the first two, in that it is primarily a spy story told from the point of view of a British diplomat serving in Egypt. As a young man, the diplomat Mountolive had an affair with an older woman who was the mother of the brothers Hosnani (Nessim and Narouz). But after serving in other parts of the world, he finds himself once again stationed in Egypt. As in the previous volume, with the shift in perspective, new facts and motivations are revealed. Characters who were scoffed at as fools in the previous volumes are revealed to be dangerous and unstable in this one.
I enjoyed the book as part of a continuing saga, but unlike its two predecessors it doesn’t really stand alone. There are too many loose ends at the conclusion of MOUNTOLIVE, despite the first-rate entertainment it provides. But I’m still interested, so now it’s on to CLEA!

It turns out that the mysterious Justine of Volume I of THE ALEXANDRIA QUARTET had even more secrets than we knew. First of all, did we really know Justine at all, considering that her story was told by a man who was under her spell and that he relied heavily upon a roman-a-clef written about her by her first husband for background information? Not really, as it turns out. The author of Volume I had given his manuscript to the doctor, Balthasar, who then extensively annotated it with the additional information that he knew, writing between the lines. The author refers to this document as “the interlinear.” This book was allegedly based on the interlinear. Events that were peripheral in JUSTINE take center stage in this volume and we learn the motivations for the actions of certain characters, which were not at all what they seemed. Several mysteries get solved and some things become even murkier. Characters who were peripheral, like Nessim’s younger brother Narouz, become major players in this volume. Although this is the second book of the Quartet, it is not a sequel to the first, but a companion. (A friend read BALTHASAR before reading JUSTINE and had no trouble understanding it.) I was enthralled by the story and by the exotic location itself. I’m not sure if I would describe the technique as looking at a situation through different planes of a prism, or through a kaleidoscope. Events look different, depending on who’s telling the story. Every narrator has his own agenda, too. This is fascinating storytelling. I’m looking forward to the next volume. Five stars.

This is the first volume of the Alexandria Quartet, in which Darley, a young English professor, introduces us to the old city, before WWII, when it was still a multicultural mosaic, an ancient amalgam of memories, trauma, and architectures. A city that was Arab, Jewish, Greek, Syrian, Armenian, British, French, Italian, and Coptic.Along his memories, Darley takes us by the hand, to mingle with the Alexandrian society, from the most illustrious to the most debased, and little by little introduces us to the unforgettable characters that inhabit this world. Beginning, of course, with the enigmatic Justine, the Jewish vampire woman with a more than turbulent past: a kidnapped and missing daughter, a tempestuous marriage to the Frenchman Arnauti (who has left a devastating written testimony of their relationship), and a new marriage to the Coptic millionaire Nessim Hosnani, the darling of Alexandrian society. Justine is, above all else, the object of desire for Alexandrians, a desire which becomes real in the beds of several men and women, among them the English novelist Pursewarden (an officer of the embassy), and Darley himself. Darley divides his passion between the tormented and tormenting Justine, and a poor and sickly dancer, Melissa. Through his equivocal friendship with Justine and Nessim, Darley gest involved in an exotic and incomprehensible world, peopled by characters like the psychoanalyst-physician, Jewish and homosexual Balthazar; the dwarf barber Mnemjian; the policeman-transvestite Scobie; or the sexual maniac Capodistria. Everything is interpreted by Darley from his naive Western perspective, and each new event confuses him more and more.

But maybe the central character of the book is the city itself, and its surroundings. The magical and whirling prose of Durrell uses this volume to give us a quick immersion in the jewel-city of Antiquity, and to set up the mysteries and relationships which will become, for Darley, an obsession, and for the readers, an eternal journey. Tension accumulates until everything explodes during a duck-hunting party.

Justine was published at a fortuitous time, in early 1957 just as the Suez Crisis was putting Egypt into headlines around the world. That country, or more precisely, the city of Alexandria, is one of the main "characters" of Justine and indeed of the four-pack of books that it initiated, The Alexandria Quartet. Indeed, in addition to the main story of the novel, I found the picture it presented of Alexandria's multicultural society quite fascinating on its own.

With The Alexandria Quartet, Lawrence Durrell, a good buddy of Henry Miller but lacking the latter's obsessive narcissism, penned what the Modern Library listed as one of the 100 Best English Language Novels of the 20th Century. I can't dispute that.

At heart it's a story of a romantic triangle, with the unnamed first-person narrator in love with Justine, the wife of good friend Nessim while two-timing his own live-in lover Melissa, who is suffering from tuberculosis. Melissa comes off as the most sympathetic of the major characters, if only because she gets relatively little face time in the narrative.

Nessim is a passive beta male in the hands of his flighty wife, to whom he seems to extend a free hand to indulge herself with lovers in the hope that she'll ultimately come to love him as a result. This rarely works, but some guys never learn.

The narrator bumbles into an affair with Justine and become obsessed with her, to the point of digging up her former husband's autobiographical novel about his relationship with Justine and memorizing frightfully large pieces of it. Justine herself comes off as a rather immature woman who may have been traumatized by an early rape (the narrative is unclear) but she certainly has no qualms about using people.

The style is not linear but impressionistic, with the narrator jumping around in the timeline. This has probably warned off a few readers but, honestly, I didn't think it was all that hard to follow. There are relatively few significant characters in addition to the Big Four, so if you pay attention and have a modicum of short term memory you should be fine.

The story is interesting on its own, as are the characters and the setting, and Durrell's style enhances rather than detracts front he pleasure of reading it. I'm very much looking forward to reading the other three books of the Alexandria Quartet.

I read the entire Alexandria Quartet in 1975, and have had mixed thoughts about it since. It does burn itself into your brain, but in this case I can't say that's a good thing. I decided to reread the quartet this year, but I got half way through Justine and threw in the towel. I can't think of a more nihilistic, depressing, brutal novel than this one. There is a leitmotif that runs through Lawrence Durrell's oeuvre that is tremendously depressing. I'm filing this away, and perhaps at some point I'll muster the courage to try it again.

Coming on the heels of three fabulous predecessors, Clea is a rather disappointing final chapter to Lawrence Durrell's Alexandria Quartet. Where the first three novels (Justine, Balthazar and Mountolive) presented an interesting and ever-widening storyline involving a growing set of interrelated characters, Clea has no real major developments to add, and that hurts the narrative interest quotient.

The book's narrator, Darley, who also narrated Justine and parts of Balthazar before disappearing almost completely in Mountolive, does take up here with Clea, a fairly minor character in the previous three books, but their relationship provides no fireworks since it is pretty uncontroversial. Neither is betraying anyone. Next to the dramatic tension of previous relationships (Darley/Justine, Nessim/Melissa, Mountolive/Leila, Pursewarden/Justine, etc.), this is very small beer indeed.

The big reveal is the incestuous relationship between Pursewarden and his sister Liza, already hinted at in Mountolive, but it's a minor development since Pursewarden is dead at the start of this book. More damaging is that some of the most fascinating characters from the first three books (Justine, Nessim, Mountolive) are almost totally absent here, and nothing really takes their place. Instead, Durrell turns here to a number of extended passages of raw philosophizing through clumsily rendered monologues or letters from various (dead) characters like Pursewarden. This is rarely a good move in a novel and it isn't here. These passages stop whatever narrative flow there is in its tracks.

Durrell's prose is still first rate and the portrait he presents of Alexandria during the Second World War years has its fascinations, but this is really a disappointing end to what had been a fantastic novel series.

Mountolive continues Lawrence Durrell's Alexandria Quartet as the third of the four books in the series. Even more than the second book, Balthazar, it subverts the assumptions of the first book, Justine, which had presented a somewhat conventional love triangle dynamic with the first-person narrator Darley's description of his affair with Justine, the wife of his friend Nessim. In the second book, Balthazar, we find that Darley's affair was something different than what he described.

Now, in Mountolive, Durrel brings several characters that had been only tangentially involved in the plot in the first two books to the forefront. One of these is of course Sir David Mountolive, the new British ambassador to Egypt, who lends his name to this installment. Mountolive's affair with Nessim's mother Leila had been alluded to in Balthazar. Here, the relationship becomes critical to the plot because of how it binds Mountolive to not only Leila but to her sons Nessim and Narouz and forces him into a difficult choice between love and friendship on one side and duty on the other. Nessim also emerges from the narrative background to become a dynamic figure, a far cry from the rather feckless cuckold he was presented as in Justine and Balthazar.

Also moving to center stage in this book is Pursewarden, who had earlier been a tangential gadfly. His relationship with Justine had been one of the big reveals in Balthazar. Here he moves further forward into becoming a kind of tragic hero.

Receding in importance, on the other hand, is Darley, who is revealed to be more a hapless dupe than anything else, a far cry from his self-important role as the narrator of the first two installments. Also coming into new light is Justine, whose motivations are fleshed out to such a point that she almost doesn't seem like the same character she was in the first and second books.

In addition to all this personal drama, Mountolive offers a rather fascinating look at the politics and intersectarian dynamics of the Egypt of the 1930s, something that is to a great extent still relevant today. I can't recommend this book or the previous two (I have yet to read Clea, the fourth and last of the series) highly enough.

Help! The only reason I am writing this review is the hope that somebody will steer me toward another author whose prose I can enjoy like Durrell's. Although the 4 novels slide inexorably downward in terms of quality, they are still a great read.
It's the words. They roll trippingly off the tongue like a fine wine, sending a chill down the spine, making me read it aloud in order to smack my lips with delight.
Only the great Bard thrills me (occasionally) like Durrell. Amazingly, for me anyway, Durrell, like Shakespeare writes prose that feels like poetry ("O for a muse of fire what would ascend the brightest heaven of invention" in Henry V), and for Durrell "The sea is high again today with a thrilling flush of wind. In the midst of winter you can feel the inventions of spring." It almost doesn't matter what the words mean- it is the words themselves as if a melody... For me, both Durrell and Shakespeare are far inferior in their poetry than their prose, notwithstanding that their prose is poetry! Judge for yourself.

Darley recibe la visita de Balthazar en su isla-exilio griega, antes de marcharse el visitante le devuelve el manuscrito. Lleno de observaciones, apuntes, notas al pie de las páginas y aclaraciones el lector le da otra visión de la historia de Justine. Con sus comentarios se desvela el amor lésbico de Clea, la unión de conveniencia de Justine con Nessim, la situación familiar de los Hosnani, el affair Pursewarden, el suicidio de este y sobre Melissa siempre en medio de toda esta promiscuidad yendo de hombre en hombre. Darley lee absorto los secretos e historias que nunca se hubiese imaginado o sospechado, atónito se entera de la verdad sobre la muerte del viejo Scobie, sobre el destino de la hija de Justine y de otros detalles escabrosos de una sociedad que creía conocer. Balthazar comenta, narra desde su experiencia en primera persona sin omitir detalle dando una imagen bidimensional de sus amigos y conocidos comunes, grotesca muchas veces pero más auténtica. La gran bacanal del carnaval alejandrino vuelve a su memoria, hombres y mujeres disfrazados, enmascarados y sedientos de aventuras se entregan a los placeres carnales sin inhibiciones y llenos de lujuria. Todos aprovechan el anonimato para dar rienda suelta a sus pasiones, todo esta permitido esos días incluyendo el crimen que queda impune en esas fechas.
Segunda parte de la tetralogía "El Cuarteto de Alejandría" en el que el autor muy hábilmente desarrolla una historia con el punto de vista de dos espectadores-protagonistas. Con una narrativa intensa, florida y un dominio de las descripciones e imágenes va mostrándonos el erotismo desbordante, los vicios y la doble moral de los personajes en cuestión infieles y promiscuos por naturaleza con unos toques homoeróticos y sado masoquistas adelantados para la época en la que se escribió esta trama que con su dramatismo intenso y sus misterios desvelados a medias intrigan al lector y lo obligan a buscar las otras dos partes de la serie: Mountolive y Clea para cerrar esta complicada historia de sentimientos insatisfechos.

El retorno a Egipto de Mountolive , esta vez investido de embajador, tras años de ausencia le hace reencontrarse con sus conocidos de antaño. La familia Hosnani, su historia y costumbres, el affaire platónico que ha llevado en la distancia con Leila, la matriarca de la familia que pacientemente fue moldeando su cultura y educación mundana a través de cartas llenas de recomendaciones y consejos. La carta-informe de Pursewarden lo pone en antecedentes del escenario político, social y religioso del país que sería su destino así como las entrevistas con los funcionarios del Foreign Office que le hacen presagiar un cargo difícil, pesado y amargo de llevar a cabo. El reencuentro con los hermanos Nessim y Naruz, con Clea y Balthazar entre otros así como la versión oficial y extraoficial del suicidio de Pursewarden ponen al diplomático en un dilema personal y profesional. Los juegos de poder se ponen en marcha para sofocar la oposición pero la corrupción política abre fuegos en direcciones opuestas. Algunas amistades son rotas, algunos amores destruidos y otras alianzas son forjadas.
Tercera novela de la tetralogía "Cuarteto de Alejandría" es la más politizada de las cuatros historias donde el autor nos lleva en medio de las melodramáticas vidas de sus personajes al desmantelamiento del sistema colonial en Egipto, los comienzos del sionismo en Palestina, la corrupción gubernamental en el mundo árabe y las nacientes fricciones entre coptos y musulmanes por las luchas de poder. Una trama que aclara un poco el comportamiento errático y desconcertante de algunos de los personajes, las manipulaciones y actitudes de otros y las consecuencias posteriores para todos en un contexto político-social del momento vivido.

Después de un largo período de ausencia, Darley el ingenuo escritor auto exiliado en una isla griega, vuelve a su añorada Alejandría. La ciudad, la misma pero diferente, amenazada por la guerra pero igual de lujuriosa y vibrante vuelve a ser el escenario de obligados reencuentros. Nessim y Justine tienen recriminaciones pendientes hacia su persona. Aparece Clea y es a través de ella que el escritor comienza a descubrir la otra cara de las historias, vidas y destinos de sus conocidos de antaño.. Casi en relatos, las venturas y desventuras de sus amigos son contadas en la cama, entre sesiones de pasión y sexo, en los cafés y en los paseos por la Alejandría de ayer, de hoy, de siempre. Balthazar, Pombal, el legado de Pursewarden, Scobie, los amores secretos de Mountolive van revelando la Belle Epoque de los exiliados que parece va llegando a su fin y ellos aun sin entenderse, encontrarse y amarse abiertamente. Las retorcidas ataduras de sus mentes, sus tradiciones y costumbres los aleja de encontrar la felicidad plena.
Última novela de la tetralogía "Cuarteto de Alejandría" en el que el autor usando una vez más la narrativa elegante, lujuriosa y directa vuelve a incursionar en las vidas privadas de sus protagonistas, sus relaciones amorosas, sus secretos, sus oscuros pasados y sus bajas pasiones emocionales desde el punto de vista de Clea. La ciudad milenaria como telón de fondo y cómplice que pone fin a una época, a unas relaciones y a unos destinos inconclusos de bon vivants sin patrias pero llenos de ganas de seguir viviendo intensamente.