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Fiction. Literature. Historical Fiction. HTML:This "very remarkable novel"â??first in the acclaimed Alexandria Quartetâ??tells a haunting story of love, desire, and deception in the Egyptian city pre-WWII (New York Herald Tribune Book Review). Set in Alexandria, Egypt, in the years between World Wars I and II, Justine is the first installment in the distinguished Alexandria Quartet. Here Lawrence Durrell crafts an exquisite and challenging modern novel that explores tragic love and the fluidity of recollection. Employing a fluctuating narrative and poetic prose, Durrell recounts his unnamed narrator's all-encompassing romance with the intoxicating Justine. The result is a matchless work that confronts all we understand and believe about sexual desire, identity, place, and the certainty of time. This ebook contains a new introduction by Jan M… (more)
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The novel is narrated by a frustrated schoolmaster in Alexandria, Egypt before World War II begins. He wants to be a writer and he has fallen neurotically in lust with Justine- a beautiful, rich, married Jewess. The problem is almost all of the characters are neurotically obsessed with Justine in one way or another. She has a very sketchy and erotic past. Justine herself is neurotic and uses the others' obsessions to satiate her own demons, emotionally destroying those involved. The plot thickens as the narrator and Justine worry that her husband, who is also the narrator's friend, knows about their affair. The city is as mesmerizing and haunting as Justine and becomes its own character in a way.
The book is beautifully written, but it is not an easy read. Passages of intellectual discussion about the nature of love, relationships, guilt, philosophy, etc. dominate. There is a book within the book, which is always a sign that the reading will not be the usual beach-reading fare. And there are frequent poetic descriptions of characters and their mental states that go on for paragraphs and sometimes for pages.
For example:
"Frankly Scobie looks anybody's age; older than the birth of tragedy, younger than the Athenian death. Spawned in the Ark by a chance meeting and mating of the bear and the ostrich; delivered before term by the sickening grunt of the keel on Ararat. Scobie came forth from the womb in a wheel chair with rubber tyres, dressed in a deer-stalker and a red flannel binder... like a patron saint he has left little pieces of his flesh all over the world..."
Another example: “The noise of her voice is jumbled in the back of his brain like the sound-track of an earthquake run backwards.”
See what I mean? Beautifully written. It's even funny, but action and pace are not first and foremost in this novel. I like stuff like this, but I think it's because I was brainwashed as an English major that I'm supposed to like it. It's difficult, intellectual, and beautiful; therefore it must be good. Is it one of the best novels of the century? No. Will I end up reading the rest of The Alexandria Quartet? Probably.
Things that struck me particularly: The style seems curiously old-fashioned for a novel of the late fifties: it's very 1930s, Henry-Millerish, stream of consciousness, building up the story with a disjointed series of impressions and memories, some told in the narrator's own voice, others quoting from imagined diaries, letters or novels. Cavafy pops up all over the place, never named in the text, but obviously acting as a sort of avatar for the city, which is practically a character in its own right. Some very cleverly ironic cameo descriptions, some terribly pretentious bits, and some rather English self-mockery. Very hard to pin down.
One of the reasons I love it is that, like many postmodern novels, Justine is about the act of reading itself. At one point our anonymous first-person narrator reads a book that was "in the first person singular, and was a diary of Alexandrian life as seen by a foreigner in the middle thirties," a day-to-day account of life in Alexandria "accurate and penetrating" (52). This description could, of course, be applied to Justine itself, and he seeks answers in its pages. Reading art gives us insight into what we have experienced.
But when we try to render events into comprehensible narratives, we reduce their power. The character Clea argues, "It is our disease […] to want to contain everything within the frame of reference of a psychology or a philosophy" (65). Despite being told this, the narrator still attempts to do it. "[E]verything is susceptible of more than one explanation" (65), yet the narrator is constantly seeking to find the answer, the explanation that will finally allow him to comprehend Justine. He's doomed to failure, of course, as is everyone else who has tried to figure out Justine. If you stick to science, you'll get no further than the fact that "man […] is just a passage for liquids and solids, a pipe of flesh" (81): true but useless.
Justine presents hope for the novel as a project, however. Our narrator has written Justine, and he has invented a new literary form in doing so. There are two times he sums up his approach the most effectively I think. On one occasion, he does it negatively, explaining why all his previous novels had not succeeded: "In art I had failed (it suddenly occurred to me at that moment) because I did not believe in the discrete human personality. ('Are people', writes Pursewarden, 'continuously themselves, or simply over and over again so fast they give the illusion of continuous features—the temporal flicker of old silent film?') I lacked a belief in the true authenticity of people in order to successfully portray them" (180). Ever since I first read the book, I've loved that parenthetical question by Pursewarden. It is why Justine is more a stream of incidents than a narrative: because that is all we are.
The narrator solves his problem as much as he can by devising a new way of writing, one he casually (as with Pursewarden's observation above) just drops into a parenthetical: "What I most need to do is to record experiences, not in the order in which they took place—for that is history—but in the order in which they first became significant to me" (102). That is Justine, and that is one of the reasons it is beautiful.
That said, the form of the novel, even the postmodern novel still generates explanations. Hence the reason for the book's three sequels: each in turn reveals that the books before it were not the explanation of the events they covered. "[E]verything is susceptible of more than one explanation," after all. Durrell pushes at the limits of novelistic form, and manages to create a beautiful example of one all at once.
Also, given the title of the course, I had to appreciate this line: "The modern novel! The grumus merdae [specks of excrement] left behind by criminals upon the scene of their misdeeds" (124).
Justine is the flawed, sensual heart of her social group, married to and in love with Nessim but too impulsively driven to find self acceptance to remain faithful to him. Her faith is in the life of the city that she believes can reveal her identity if she can only find the key, like finding a small precise key to a beautiful and intricate pocket watch. The urgency is to find the key before her time of manic energy runs out. Durrell writes, "Somewhere in the heart of experience there is order and coherence which we might surprise if we are attentive enough, or patient enough. Will there be time?"
The order and coherence of Alexandria is amoral so Justine's understanding of herself cannot be constricted by standard rules of behavior. To love Justine is to hate oneself because she embodies qualities one can never possess, just like the city that created her. For Justine self possession is finding meaning in her unconscious identification with the city, acting out in cycles of irrational sensual and destructive acts, like the repeating cycles of the history of Alexandria.
I highly recommend this novel that details the futile attempt of Justine to restructure her past. She attaches to other residents of Alexandria who are seeking answers to their own mysteries in hedonism, religion, cultural identification, and mysticism. She wreaks havoc by showing them there is no apparent structure to life and love, there is no personality. There is only the temporary routine of habits of behavior and thought. The answer may be to simply surrender without qualification to the passion of the city and look for patterns of emotion.
Experimental fiction that was reportedly a commercial and critical success when first published, it has not aged well. Some of the stylistic quirks, such as heavily quoting the words of a fictional author in the story, just seem odd, while others are just self
Now I'm trying to recapture that excitement. I'm finding Justine quite hard work again, but I am steadily working may way through it because I know what lies ahead. Sometimes as I'm reading I think it's all just pretentious rubbish - Malcolm Bradbury's parody in The Faber Book of Parodies is excellent - but afterwards I always come back to the conviction that Justine is a truly exceptional book, something on a different level from most of the other books I have ever read.
Durrell feverishly and uncompromisingly explores the inner-workings of his half-dozen lead characters, filtered
It's an exhausting experience, this much is true. Emotionally, linguistically, even - in some unusual way - physically. At the same time, this snappy (200 page) book never feels dense. Despite his closely-textured style, the reader can race through this experience, never feeling daunted by the words at hand.
Are there parts of Durrell and his style that I question? Certainly. Women, homosexuals, children, people of different colours and religions... they're all given equal weight as characters, certainly, but sometimes they're more easily defined by their different element. (Durrell's feelings on sex and love are complex, but at times it seems like he sees gay men as simply horny men who have forsaken love for the easier - but undoubtedly loveless - sexual interaction that comes with men. And his characters constantly referring to children as "it" annoys me, even though I accept it was a commonplace of the era.) One could also ask questions about his interactions with the lower classes. Durrell's Alexandria pulses with life, this is true, and his descriptive passages are viscerally evocative. However, his characters rarely engage with work or real life; they seem instead to drift through at their own pace. Perhaps this is being too specific - after all, why should the novel focus on the narrator's teaching career when it is exploring his relationship with Justine? Or perhaps it is being churlish - by the inverse token, "Les Miserables" doesn't feature many sympathetic or realistically-drawn rich people: that would be against its mandate! So, I'll let it slide.
Durrell can be a challenging read for someone of my generation. First, much of his speech and use of words is archaic (when was the last time anyone used "terrible" to mean anything other than "of poor quality"?). Second, he had me running for the dictionary sometimes as much as four times in one sentence! (Not that I'd ever complain about learning new words or being challenged, it just unnerves me as someone who has always prided myself on my vocabulary). Thirdly, and perhaps most importantly, he comes from a very different generation and - more importantly - was writing for people like himself: upper-middle-class folk who has plenty of leisure time, who had undoubtedly travelled Europe and/or Northern Africa, who had at least a workable knowledge of three or four Romance languages, and who had a thorough knowledge of mythological, literary, and cultural references. It struck me the other day, while reading "Justine" on the train, that our society has segregated far more of late. The middle class no longer have this knowledge; it is reserved only for the few who develop a passion for it, and the few who are born to it. I almost fit that bill, so I was less challenged than many readers may be, but it's certainly clear that Durrell's target audience no longer exists, and that these books - written a scant 55 years ago - will need to be quite exhaustively annotated for future generations, if they are to remain in the public eye at all.
"Justine" still has much to offer. Its depictions of Alexandria, oozing sweat and life and dust. The broken reminiscences of the narrator, attempting to reconcile his notions of love and sex with his experiences of same. The fascinating complexities of Nessim and Melissa, of Scobie and Clea, even of the seemingly one-note Capodistria. And, of course, the eponymous portrait. I'm assuming that that fractured portraiture is Durrell's ultimate endgame, as I will discover when I read the remainder of the Alexandria Quartet. Justine is seen refracted through so many pairs of eyes in this novel, and each heart, each mind teases out different pieces of information. None of them are wrong, per se, but none of them are absolutely right. Durrell is asking us to consider which parts of a person's dimensions are truly the essence of themselves. After all, we all wear so many masks in life that these elements threaten to overtake, and, of course, we are many different - yet truthful - things to many different people. Beyond this, we evolve and change with each experience in life. And finally, there is the fact that sometimes our minds do hold breathtaking contradictions, some that we cannot quite understand ourselves.
For such a messy question, Durrell has found quite an elegant attempt at an answer.
Justine believes she is a slave to fate, that she must inevitably act upon attraction even before it burgeons into love. It's a strange belief I can't relate to, but I found solace from confusion in the narrator - her latest lover - who doesn't really believe in it either. Nonetheless it is part of the mystery of her that attracts him in return. Both of them betray other loves in their lives, each of those relationships with its own complications. Their secret cannot be kept forever.
Dialogue like music, its lyrics like poetry, whatever the subject matter. Nearly everyone in this novel is fiercely introspective, if not always correct in their analysis. The narrator is aided by a novel written by Justine's former lover that he uses as a map to navigate his own relationship with her. Perhaps here Durrell is cribbing from an earlier draft of a similar story, his own "Go Find a Watchman". The title's borrowing from Marquis de Sade does not at first seem as direct in the novel's content. The Justine of this novel acts more like her own torturer, until we learn her behaviour is likely explained by childhood abuse. Possibly it was darker abuse than we know, further shaded by fears for her lost daughter. The reader should anticipate a bolt of lightning?
It reads as an
There is an epigram of Freud opening the novel that says, “I am accustoming myself to the idea of regarding every sexual act as a process in which four persons are involved. We shall have a lot to discuss about that.” This, in a word, sums up much of the novel. The narrator, who remains unnamed throughout, befriends a tubercular Alexandrine prostitute named Melissa, but begins an affair with a woman named Justine, who is already married to the wealthy Coptic Christian Nessim. The attempt to hide the affair and Nessim’s growing suspicion and jealousy are what drive the novel. (It wasn’t by accident that I used the words “soap opera” above.) Durrell seems to want Alexandria to be as obscurantist and full the “Other” as possible: he puts several of the main characters in a philosophical-religious cabal, but at the end its influence and importance hasn’t been revealed.
What makes this novel truly spectacular is the language, the episodic jumps in time, the lush lyricism, and how Durrell so deftly manages to tie this all into both the city of Alexandria and the themes of passion, love, and jealousy. I’ll leave you with just a few lines from the very end, just to entice:
“The cicadas are throbbing in the great plains, and the summer Mediterranean lies before me in all its magnetic blueness. Somewhere out there, beyond the mauve throbbing line of the horizon lies Africa, lies Alexandria, maintaining its tenuous grasp on one’s affections through memories which are already refunding themselves slowly into forgetfulness; memory of friends, of incidents long past. The slow unreality of time begins to grip them, blurring the outlines – so that sometimes I wonder whether these pages record the actions of real human beings or whether this is not simply the story of a few inanimate objects which precipitated drama around them – I mean a black pitch, a watch-key and a couple of dispossessed wedding-rings…”
A number of the group felt that the book was misogynistic, which is always a risk when reading authors writing in the 50s (Think Henry Miller, who was a good friend of Durrell's). I was frustrated by the view given to Justine's character as some sort of absolute seeker, instead of a women who we eventually learned was damaged in a very particular way.
But the book is also about writers and writing. And when I reread it, I would like to try to focus on that, and on the character of Alexandria and the nature of the expat life in a city and country where you and your circle are outsiders even in a cosmopolitan city. Alexandria is so wonderfully described in this book, you can almost smell it and see the narrow streets and the beaches and buildings as if they were photographed for you. It's a city that doesn't exist anymore, of course, as the colonialists and expats of this era have long since been kicked out.
It's good to read on Kindle, so that you can look up the more erudite language Durrell sometimes uses. I did resort to Google for translations of some of the dialog in French. Some people thought his use of language was pretentious, but I feel it reflects his academic and intellectual circle and the language they were comfortable. That he doesn't give us any quarter is beside the point.
Legacy: modernistic, prewar story of love, sex.
Style/structure: epiphany style of James Joyce. As the New Yorker article states; memory has free range, no formal attempt is made at structure or even at rendering the story easy to follow. It takes a great deal of work to read this relatively short work by page count. Durrell is a lyrist and each word seems to be purposely chosen, often requiring looking up (at least for me). Thank goodness for Kindle dictionary.
Sex is a big part of this book yet the author does not force a lot of detail on the reader but still it is enough to before and after details and it is used as cover up for espionage, personal sacrifice, neediness, and desire for power. (Foster). There really is no healthy sexual encounters in this book.
While this is a story where characters are described as Libertines and are on their own, as far as adulthood, it is also a story where the characters are coming to age. Melissa, Justine and our narrator.
Full review of sorts will ensue when the tetralogy is completed.
The unnamed narrator writes about his life in Alexandria Egypt before World War II. He is English probably although that is never completely specified. He supported himself by teaching and he was trying to write in his spare time. He doesn't actually have much spare time because he hobnobs with the expat community. He has a girlfriend, Melissa, who is a dancer at a nightclub but he falls in love with Justine, the wife of a rich banker. Justine has a history of sexual affairs; her first husband wrote a book about her and her unfaithfulness. Our narrator has almost memorized the whole book. Justine's present husband suspects she is having an affair but doesn't seem to know with whom. Various other personages circle through the pages. This book is the first of four books about the same group of people so perhaps some of those people will become more important in other books. I don't think I am sufficiently interested in them to read the other books of the quartet.
Set in Egypt in the 1930s, this book is about an unnamed man having an affair with the titular Justine, though he professes to love his long-term girlfriend, Melissa. Justine is married to Nessim, and she says he loves her husband, but she carries on with multiple lovers as if she cannot control this part of her nature. Jealousy is a main theme.
It is broken into four segments. The first two were difficult to get through, basically describing the decadent life of expats in Alexandria. This type of subject matter rarely appeals to me, and I almost gave up on it. The third becomes more focused, as Nessim finds out about Justine’s affair. The fourth segment is outstanding and the best part of the book.
It is ornately written, which was distracting at first, but I came to appreciate it by the end. Speaking of the end, the characters finally realize that their actions have repercussions, so it has more substance. It took me forever to read this relatively short book (250 pages). I can appreciate its literary merit, but I am also glad to be finished.