1054 Justine, by Lawrence Durrell (read 30 May 1970) I know this guy, Durrell, writes well, but really how can I care what he writes about? I really don't. I recognize no truth in any of the supposedly profound insights he displays. The whole book just plain bored me. O, towards the end the story falls into place, etc., but I just cannot care about Justine, and Nessim and Melissa, and "I". I am not going to read the other three volumes in the quartet. Alexandria means nothing to me. [But I did read them in 2002!] ( )

The first of Lawrence Durrell’s famous tetralogy, The Alexandria Quartet, “Justine” is a refreshingly archaic romance in the old-world meaning of the word. Compared to more modern exegesis of love, which tend to be fairly barbaric and/or saturated in ham-fisted prurience, Durrell writes in (and of) an era wherein love is synonymous with sadness; the inescapable solitude of the self underlies the emotional paradoxes of the novel. The cinematic, pre-war patina of exoticism/isolation lends the story a heavy-handed kind of charm, but the real pleasure comes in his jabs of hard truth and lyrical insight. It’s a beautiful little book. ( )

fiction ( )

Justine is an exciting love story about the Middle East that made me think about how I see things different from other people. I read the Alexander Quartet and was shocked by each perspective and realized different people have different realities. I liked the context of the story and the drama provided but most of all, I liked the different perspectives provided. Justine is just the beginning. ( )

I first read this book back in January 2007 for a class on postmodern British literature. It intrigued me, and I wanted to read the rest of The Alexandria Quartet, and so I eventually picked them up. But Justine is a confusing book and I was reluctant to dive into its companion novels on only a vague memory, so I decided to give the original a reread beforehand. Justine's an unusual book: it's the recollections of an unnamed English schoolteacher who lived in Alexandria during the runup to World War II. It's not told in chronological order, but ostensibly the order in which the events became important to him. It's mostly concerned with his various love affairs: with Melissa, his true love and an exotic dancer, and with Justine, a good (married) friend of his. How can he love two women at the same time? Does Justine love any of the men she carries on with at the same time? These are the questions that consume the narrator, and the novel is essentially his ruminations on these matters, up to the point where all the arrangements fell apart. It's not the most straightforward of books, but I love Durrell's insights into love, into time, into character. The narrator finds it impossible to understand people, and his attempts to piece them together make some intriguing reading and some good lines. The prose is dense but enjoyable; the city of Alexandria is more than effectively brought to life in these pages. Overall, it's a difficult book, but it's most certainly a rewarding one.