Justine

Many of the criticisms of this work are certainly easy to understand. Durrel’s characterizations of most of the women in the story can range from the merely inane to the truly offensive. Orientalism, so common in western literary writers during this time period, is displayed with the usual clichés, at times leading to sentences that will give most contemporary readers pause: he describes how the city of Alexandria “has been built like a dyke to hold back the flood of African darkness, but the soft-footed blacks have already started leaking into the European quarters.” And yes, the writing style can be florid or over-the-top ‘literary’ at times. All fair points.

The charge that the plot is hard to follow is unfounded, however. show more The lack of a strictly linear plot is stated clearly by Durrell’s narrator, as he wishes to “record experiences, not in the order in which they took place—that is history—but in the order in which they first became significant for me.” The book Durrell’s narrator is reading spells it out: its author wishes to write a different kind of book, not “the sort of book to which we are accustomed these days. For example, on the first page a synopsis of the plot and a few lines. Thus we might dispense with the narrative articulation. What follows would be drama freed from the burden of form. I would set my own book free to dream.” Durrell wrote a Modernist book, using that style’s themes: memory, time and space, urban settings, questioning reality, fractured identities. This was an important book *given its time period.*

What saves the book are its moments and its use of the city as the main character, not its overall arc. There are sentences and paragraphs that are truly gorgeous, writing that you know you have not read, in some similar form, many times before. It’s an entire workshop on how to use setting as a character. Long after individual details are forgotten, the emotional resonance that permeates the book will make it worth a second read, if you can get past those areas where the work has not fully met its own expectations.

Justine is the first book of the Alexandria Quartet, and I suspect the sum will be greater than any individual part. What appear to be plot holes in the book, unanswered questions, will probably feature in varying degrees in the subsequent books. show less

I first read this novel, along with the rest of the Quartet, back in the 90's. I remember being enthralled by the narrative, but after more than thirty years, I didn't remember many of the details, just that it was about an adulterous affair and set in Alexandria, Egypt.

In this second reading, I was as entranced by the sense of time and place as I was the first time. The city of Alexandria wafts off the pages with desert heat and ancient, crumbling stones. The city is a character as much as the humans that people the narrative, shaping and being shaped by the events that occur within and without. In a way, the character of Justine is the living avatar of Alexandria, a labyrinth of twisting streets, blind alleys, and past tragedies; an show more extended metaphor, beautifully rendered. But where the younger me saw the exotic romance and passion, the older me sees a story of objectification and obsession, the 'othering' of the woman who is the focus of the narrative, which I find uncomfortable, even cringy in places. The book abounds with racial overtones, and most of the main characters are white, expatriates in Alexandria.

Justine's Jewishness is constantly mentioned, not in terms of religion, but in terms of ethnicity. None of the men who are her lovers see her as a person. To them she is a goddess, a sex object, something to be possessed and manipulated and explored, if not exploited. The unnamed narrator doesn't ever ask himself what he brings to the table, what it is that Justine sees in him. He never sees her as a person, only as a puzzle to be solved. He never counts the consequences of his actions, though he very likely destroyed several lives, including his own.

I don't know what Durrell's purpose was, but if it was to show these two levels of awareness, he succeeded. As a writer, Durrell is the opposite of Hemingway. He paints every thought, every emotion, sculpting and building the story like an Impressionist painter builds a painting. He focuses on emotional nuance and depth, often skipping over important events that are only alluded to in metaphor and memory.

The story pacing is languid and serpentine, as is the prose. The narrative is a jumbled mosaic of thoughts, memories, and introspection. This isn't a book to be sped through, but rather one to be savored and thought about.

Aspects of this novel include: first person POV, single narrator, fractured structure with flashbacks and flashforward, lots of internal monologue. Rich and textured sense of place. show less

Our reading group was quite lively discussing this, with some people hating it and some loving it. The sort of expressionist or modern style of the first two thirds, non-linear and recursive, didn't appeal to many of us, and I confess I was beginning to zone out before the linear part of the book took over. Then it was a more suspenseful tale, as the actual outcome of the shooting party was in doubt. Some of the readers loved the language, and I think if I hadn't been in a hurry to read it, and could have read a little each day, it would have been a more absorbing read for me. So it goes on the 'reread someday' list. I also felt that the rest of the quartet would flesh out the story substantially, and that we were left with only the show more narrator's view of a very complex society.

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. show less

I love this book, and when I was assigned to teach a class on The Modern Novel (major novels after 1900), I knew I wanted to teach it. Many of my students sort of bounced off it: it's a difficult book to follow, and it was late enough in the semester that I don't think all of my students were being particularly careful readers. (The class average on the four-question quiz was 39%, even when I scored it out of three!) We ended up having to spend one of our four class sessions just discussing what was going on in it. Yet I don't regret my decision to teach it for an instant. Indeed, I wish I could teach a whole course on The Alexandria Quartet. Probably you'd want to read Justine twice over to make it really work.

One of the reasons I love show more 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). show less

Justine is a story of adultery, of fate, of attraction. It's the story of Alexandria, Egypt as well, which the narrator blames on page one for all that follows. It's a fascinating setting brought to life with Durrell's Proustian descriptive passages - but not really so dry as that. He demonstrates the city's character through its citizens, exposing us to a wide swath of the social scale and all of their qualities. Alexandria as he portrays it is a den of self-aware licentiousness closely tied to a sense of the inevitable. This serves to feed the same beliefs in the character Justine.

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 show more 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? show less

“I tried to tell myself how stupid this was — a banal story of an adultery which was among the cheapest commonplaces of the city: and how it did not deserve romantic or literary trappings” (87).

In a way that’s exactly what this novel is about, but it is also a mediation on human relationships, why we form them, and why we need them. And it is beautifully written. This is prose poetry if I’ve ever seen it. Durrell has a knack for delivering sometimes windy descriptions of locations and mental states but more often for delivering incisive observations delivered in unusual metaphoric or analogical terms.

The only thing that irritated me about the book was the way that the Durrell’s prose elevated mundane characters to such show more unbelievable, dizzying heights of profundity. Of course all of this is filtered through the narrator, an author trying to set these details down and to make sense of his own experiences which, of course, must seem profound to him. How can he bear to be be where he ends up at the end of the novel except by retelling those events as grand and profound? If he can’t be happy, perhaps he can say that he learned something. Nevertheless, I’m a little disappointed that some of the main characters, especially the women, are so lifeless. It’s paradoxical, perhaps, for women like Justine and Melissa to be so flat and abstract as characters but so elevated and rich as symbols in the author’s mind. So, that flatness may be more the narrator of the book than Durrell.

Perhaps another explanation comes from the fact that the story is set in Alexandria, the seat of learning and knowledge in antiquity — the site of the Great Library of Alexandria. As the author of the manuscript we receive as Justine, the narrator is attempting to understand or to know something about Justine. His desire for knowledge of her is described at one point as a “devouring” of her. In this way, Durrell positions Justine as an object (of knowledge) and it is difficult for her to budge from that position. Melissa and Nessim are similarly positioned. But in studying people this way, the narrator does manage to deliver very thoughtful points about relationships.

One of the observations that stuck with me: “[…] each person can only claim one aspect of our character as part of his knowledge. To everyone we turn a different face of the prism” (119). I understood this like facets of a gemstone. And what we choose to develop and understand about our character for ourselves is a subset of what we project to others. We may gravitate to people who see a facet that we admire or recognize or develop in ourselves. And our other facets attract other people. Similarly, the facets that we see of others attract us to them. We all have many surfaces to support multiple relationships of love, acquaintanceship, disdain, cruelty, etc. The implication of an observation like this is that there are different facets through which we connect to and know others, some beautiful and kind, some aloof and professional, some cruel or indifferent.

Building those relationships drives a desire to know, but what we know or can know about others is so limited. And there are things about those who are close to us that we may not want to know. This also implies that there are different ways of knowing one another, spiritually, bodily, intellectually, emotionally. Likewise, there are many different ways that we have of knowing, through conversation, observation, and imagination … through others’ eyes and through our own. Ultimately, however, what evidence do we have that what we know is true or justified or warranted or permanent?

I sound a bit negative about things but I actually did like the book and plan to read the rest of the quartet. There is a lot to like and to think about here. show less

I've waited decades to read this book, it seems. It was always the one book I "meant to get to" and never did. Perhaps I waited too long.

The words are lovely. Even the sentences are beautiful. The construction is exquisite. Yet, I was left feeling as cold as ice.

There is poetry that is constructed with passion and the minute your eyes light on it, it sets you on fire. Then there is poetry that is constructed with the fine precision of a Patek Philipe and it leaves you feeling nothing. Justine left me numb. Not with beauty. Not with awe. Just numb.

How can one be bored with such a voluptuous tale? If passion is not to be found in Alexandria, then it exists not at all.

I admired the beauty, the composition, the invention -- but for me, it show more was like walking across the Arctic Plains: oh so beautiful, but get me out of here because I long for warmth.

I don't know whether Durrell got wrapped up in his own fabrication to such an extent that he lost the purpose of the story, or whether he was innately such a cold person, but ... I need to come in from this storm. show less