Justine: Introduced by André Aciman

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Alexandrie dans les années trente, des personnages que l'on voit vivre et dont on découvre qu'ils échappent à tout jugement, la politique occidentale représentée par l'Angleterre opposée au réveil de l'Egypte, la montée de l'Islam opposée aux Coptes, etc. Tout cela est exprimée dans une écriture foisonnante où se régalent les métaphores. Les longues descriptions font vivre ce qui est exprimé.

I’ve been hearing about The Alexandria Quartet ever since I was a teenager in the 60s. When it was published in the late 1950s it was immediately hailed as a great intellectual achievement. It was a very popular book among the generation just older than mine, but by the time I came along Durrell was a bit passé and the new intellectual darlings were the freewheeling satirists Joseph Heller and Terry Southern. However, THE ALEXANDRIA QUARTET always had a devoted following and has never been out-of-print. Jan Morris, in this edition’s superb introduction, opines that it is unlikely to ever be. I don’t think I could state anything here that could be more helpful than Morris’s Introduction. She praises the book, but also warns the reader that Durrell can be outrageously pretentious at times. (She hits the nail on the head when she writes about Durrell’s flashily arcane vocabulary.)I had difficulty getting into the book, but I kept reading. I’m glad I did. It seems at first to be a lot of poetic stream-of-conscious meanderings, but gradually the pieces start to fit together and the reader sees how the characters are interrelated. Most of what happens is beneath the surface, with characters trying figure out what the other characters are thinking; there are few real events in the novel, and the major ones take place offstage.I was reluctant to begin a multi-volume work. This one is different. JUSTINE easily stands alone. It is complete within itself. I never had the feeling that it was a “prequel.” According to Lawrence’s introduction of the second volume, of the four books, only the last volume CLEA is a sequel. He compares the first three volumes to siblings, rather than sequels. The first three all deal with the same characters at the same time, but are told from different points of view. JUSTINE is pretty dazzling. I’m eager to find out whether Durrell can sustain this level of writing. Five stars.

Muy buena lenguaje, por lo tanto podéis acabarlo en 2 días. Y además es un poco atrevido para su momento.

I've just finished reading this book for the first time. As a middlebrow I realised early on that there was no point wondering exactly what Durrell meant - just read on, otherwise one would never get through it. The book is aimed at far more intelligent and cultured people than myself. (It would be nice if there were an annotated "For Dummies" edition - but perhaps it would be impossibly long. I'd probably buy it though.) What I got out of this primarily was the depiction of Justine as a woman who inspires spiritual love. It reminds me of the pre-Raphaelites who are generally denounced as pornographers nowadays. It's surprising to me that Durrell is not denounced similarly. Certainly the Justine character is hyper-erotic. Perhaps the characters in the story are mythical rather than realistically human. Anyway I've ordered Vol 2 - "Balthazar".