Justine: Lawrence Durrell

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Botting, Douglas (1999). Gerald Durrell: The Authorised Biography. HarperCollins. ISBN 0-00-255660-X. Living on this bare promontory, snatched every night from darkness by Arcturus, far from the lime-laden dust of those summer afternoons, I see at last that none of us is properly to be judged for what happened in the past. It is the city which should be judged though we, its children, must pay the price. During World War Two, Durrell served as a press attaché to the British embassies, first in Cairo and then Alexandria. While in Alexandria he met Eve (Yvette) Cohen (1918–2004), a Jewish Alexandrian. She inspired his character Justine in The Alexandria Quartet. In 1947, after his divorce from Nancy was completed, Durrell married Eve Cohen, with whom he had been living since 1942. [14] The couple's daughter, Sappho Jane, was born in Oxfordshire in 1951, [15] and named after the ancient Greek poet Sappho. [16] The word "rebirth" is in the air. It is the main idea behind another important British novelist, C.P. Snow. But there is a world of difference between the two. Snow is responding from a sense of public responsibility; Durrell is testifying shyly I would not continue listening to the next audiobook unless I felt I had to, but I simply HAVE to understand these characters more fully. I don’t want to leave them. I have to see each one’s perspective. I guess it all comes down to the fact that I care for these self-centered foolish idiots that so annoyed me in the beginning. I will focus on the author’s description of events and places rather than his excessive philosophizing. Since I feel I have to continue, I must give this book three stars. It is that simple.

In 1957, Durrell published Justine, the first novel of what was to become his most famous work, The Alexandria Quartet. Justine, Balthazar (1958), Mountolive (1958), and Clea (1960), deal with events before and during the Second World War in the Egyptian city of Alexandria. The first three books tell essentially the same story and series of events, but from the varying perspectives of different characters. Durrell described this technique in his introductory note in Balthazar as "relativistic." Only in the final novel, Clea, does the story advance in time and reach a conclusion. Critics praised the Quartet for its richness of style, the variety and vividness of its characters, its movement between the personal and the political, and its locations in and around the ancient Egyptian city which Durrell portrays as the chief protagonist: "The city which used us as its flora—precipitated in us conflicts which were hers and which we mistook for our own: beloved Alexandria!" The Times Literary Supplement review of the Quartet stated: "If ever a work bore an instantly recognizable signature on every sentence, this is it."The rest sounded shallow to this reader's ears. The melodramatic characters. The crisscrossed, doomed love affairs. The psychoanalytical and rather useless chatter of the narrator. Everything but the city was depicted with any substantial depth, everything paled in comparison to the great detail with which magnificent Alexandria was brought to life. It is only as the train begins to move, and as the figure at the window, dark against the darkness, lets go of my hand, that I feel Melissa is really leaving; feel everything that is inexorably denied — [...] I stand as if marooned on an iceberg. Of Justine? She was exigent, yet we shared a flirtation so profound it went beyond sexual attraction. "It can come to nothing, this passion between a poor schoolteacher and a married society beauty," I said. "The city gives us no choice," she replied in all seriousness. especially significant that he reports truthfully the sordidness of his material and makes something strong, healthy, wise, sad, amusing and beautiful of it. He has the eloquence of the twice-born. It's because the imagination fulfils their potential, that the moments live on in perpetuity. An artist creates something separate from experience that survives the present.

Andrewski, Gene; Mitchell, Julian (23 April 1959). "Lawrence Durrell: The Art of Fiction No. 23 (interview)". The Paris Review . Retrieved 1 July 2006.

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The writing is poetic and luscious and you can feel the shimmering heat of Alexandria and its scents, colours and sounds. The city is almost another character; a city of dreams and lost horizons. The whole thing is magical, erotic, steeped in Freud. The poetry of Cavafy at the end is especially apt. Literary Lifelines: The Richard Aldington—Lawrence Durrell Correspondence (1981) edited by Ian S. MacNiven and Harry T. Moore

There is no pain compared to that of loving a woman who makes her body accessible to one and yet who is incapable of delivering her true self - because she does not know where to find it." The scene is dusty, modern Alexandria, and the milieu one that mixes exceptional sophistication with exceptional sordidness. The time is not stated, but it may be the Nineteen Thirties. The narrator is a penniless young Irish school teacher who gives

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Durrell was born in Jalandhar, British India, the eldest son of Indian-born British colonials Louisa (who was Anglo-Irish) and Lawrence Samuel Durrell, an engineer of English ancestry. [3] His first school was St. Joseph's School, North Point, Darjeeling. He had three younger siblings — two brothers and a sister — naturalist Gerald Durrell, Leslie Durrell and author Margaret Durrell.

The Alexandria Quartet is a tetralogy of novels by British writer Lawrence Durrell, published between 1957 and 1960. A critical and commercial success, the first three books present three perspectives on a single set of events and characters in Alexandria, Egypt, before and during the Second World War. The fourth book is set six years later.Now if I wrote I would try for a multi-dimensional effect in character, a sort of prism-sightedness. Why should not people show more than one profile at a time...a hybrid: a joint." In 1947, Durrell was appointed director of the British Council Institute in Córdoba, Argentina. He served there for eighteen months, giving lectures on cultural topics. [17] He returned to London with Eve in the summer of 1948, around the time that Marshal Tito of Yugoslavia broke ties with Stalin's Cominform. Durrell was posted by the British Council to Belgrade, Yugoslavia, [18] and served there until 1952. This sojourn gave him material for his novel White Eagles over Serbia (1957).