The New York Times Book Review says Justine "Demands comparison with the very best novels of our century." The back of my copy states, "Justine has inspired an almost religious devotion among readers and critics." If that doesn't make you want to read it, nothing I write could ever convince you to pick it up.

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. ( )

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.

Justine is far too complicated a work to review properly on a first quick reading - I want to come back to it when I've read the rest of the Quartet. First impression is that it's far too self-consciously modernist for my taste, but it might grow on me. I've never really developed a taste for Henry Miller either.

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. ( )

Very intellectually dense to read. I finally got through it a second time. Very sensual and exotic flavor to it. Very....abstract (I think that's the word I'm looking for) ( )

Lawrence Durrell.... His prose is eloquent and full of rich imagery, poetic turns of phrase and a dense narrative style not completely unlike some of William Faulkner's work. His characters are well crafted, rounded, believable people. It is, technically, a top notch book.

But I hate it.

Read the rest of my review of Justine on my blog, The Nerd is the Word.

http://nerdword.blogspot.com/2006/10/... ( )

I feel like a lot of this novel went over my head but the underlying story love and duplicity in 1930s Alexandria, Egypt is compelling enough to make me want to read the other three volumes of this said-to-be-one-of-the-greatest quartet. ( )