Justine

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The first novel in the tetralogy, Justine, is a deliberately cryptic journey through the recent past of a British teacher and aspiring writer, his name revealed in the later books as Darley. Darley has recently fled from Egypt to an island of Greece in the Aegean Sea, along with the child of his deceased lover Melissa. On the island, he reflects on his pre-war memories of Alexandria in Egypt, a somewhat derelict port city he romanticizes over because of an affair that took place there. The affair was between him and a woman named Justine, and was coupled with a friendship with many Egyptians and expatriates brought together in anticipation of World War II. He meets such characters as his lustful roommate Pombal; a banker named Nessim who is Justine’s true husband; a novelist named Pursewarden who ultimately commits suicide; a gay doctor named Balthazar; and an elderly policeman Scobie, who moonlights as a crossdresser and hooks up with British sailors, and is ultimately killed in a hate crime. The mental intimacy is conceptualised as a single shared entity, a unity, that is projecting a total picture. Scobie’s story comes to an end when he is murdered by British sailors in a hate crime against his lewdness and sexual identity. A painter named Clea mentioned briefly in Justine is revealed to have a close friendship with Darley and is wary of Narouz’s desire for her. Justine learns of a masquerade, where her friend Toto de Brunel is stabbed; it is revealed that he is wearing her ring. Balthazar concludes the volume by commenting philosophically that each fact or event in life is predicated by multitudes of inexplicable motivations. There are only three things to be done with a woman, said Clea once. You can love her, suffer for her, or turn her into literature." Botting, Douglas (1999). Gerald Durrell: The Authorised Biography. HarperCollins. ISBN 0-00-255660-X.

Each character is a facet of the Alexandrian world. Equally, each discrete section of text displays a separate facet of one of the characters. Alexandre-Garner, Corinne, ed. Lawrence Durrell: Actes Du Colloque Pour L'Inauguration De La Bibliothèque Durrell. Confluences 15. Nanterre: Université Paris-X, 1998.

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Around this event, dazed and preoccupied, the lover moves examining his or her own experience; her gratitude alone, stretching away towards a mistaken donor, creates the illusion that she communicates with her fellow, but this is false. The loved object is simply one that has shared an experience at the same moment of time, narcissistically; and the desire to be near the beloved object is at first not due to the idea of possessing it, but simply to let the two experiences compare themselves, like reflections in different mirrors. I went home to Melissa. "You are in love with Justine," she said. "No," I replied. "It is much worse than that." Is narcissism a habit? Was I too strong to be loved? Was I utterly deluded? In 1955 Durrell separated from Eve Cohen. He married again in 1961, to Claude-Marie Vincendon, whom he met on Cyprus. She was a Jewish woman born in Alexandria. Durrell was devastated when Claude-Marie died of cancer in 1967. He married for the fourth and last time in 1973, to Ghislaine de Boysson, a French woman. They divorced in 1979. I decided to re-read "Justine" after something like 30 years before starting the subsequent books of "The Alexandria Quartet" for the first time.

Eve (Cohen) Durrell and mirror image (the apparent inspiration for Justine and the person to whom the novel is dedicated: "To Eve - these memorials of her native city") Art & Outrage: A Correspondence About Henry Miller Between Alfred Perles and Lawrence Durrell (1959) Increasingly we believe the world needs more meaningful, real-life connections between curious travellers keen to explore the world in a more responsible way. That is why we have intensively curated a collection of premium small-group trips as an invitation to meet and connect with new, like-minded people for once-in-a-lifetime experiences in three categories: Culture Trips, Rail Trips and Private Trips. Our Trips are suitable for both solo travelers, couples and friends who want to explore the world together. Prospero's Cell: A guide to the landscape and manners of the island of Corcyra [Corfu] (1945; republished 2000) ( ISBN 0-571-20165-2)Zahlan, Anne R. "Avignon Preserved: Conquest and Liberation in Lawrence Durrell's Constance." The Literatures of War. Ed. Richard Pine and Eve Patten. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars, 2009. 253–276. Ah Clea! The numinous, unknowable Clea, the painter of victims of venereal disease - a minor one of which I was recovering from myself. "I do not deny myself love," she said. "I am living in the beauty of an achieved relationship with a woman." But this is just the first volume in the Quartet. If this is how the narrator starts, is it how he ends? Born in India to British colonial parents, he was sent to England at the age of eleven for his education. He did not like formal education, but started writing poetry at age 15. His first book was published in 1935, when he was 23. In March 1935 he and his mother and younger siblings moved to the island of Corfu. Durrell spent many years thereafter living around the world.

He was predeceased by his younger daughter, Sappho Jane, who took her own life in 1985 at age 33. After Durrell's death, it emerged that Sappho's diaries included allusions to an alleged incestuous relationship with her father. [16] [23] [24] [25] Durrell's government service and his attitudes [ edit ] 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. 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."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).