I first read the Alexandria quartet, years ago, many years ago, maybe during school or university. Honestly I am not sure when, and indeed I don't think I read all the 4 books. What I am sure of is that i read the first half of Justine and I think I never finished it.
Years later, I am hear again picking up the book and starting from the start. I am now mid-way through the third book and I have to stop to breathe. Durell is just fascinating, he has blown my head up.
Finishing "Justine" (Book 1), I was breathless filled with emotions of rage and sympathy. Images of my cosmopolitan city with the layers of different people walking her streets and creating a portrait that was so full on for anyone to take in. But reading Justine left me missing something, I felt I was imprisoned in a 1-D cell, that is the narrators view of things, his experiences with bits and pieces that were not enough to me.
Then came "Balthazar" (Book 2), to add in multiple more dimensions, and seeing that even while we think we know it all and we are the heroes of our own stories, this is not wholly true. In the unfathomable depth and abstraction of human relationship, nothing is simple or 1-D. Every character know has more to give, more to fascinate my mind and pop up even more questions. We can see the bewilderment that Balthazar comments brings on the narrator who has banished himself to a far away island after the disappearance of Justin and the death of Melissa. All the known facts of his life are rattled by comments interlinear by Balthazar into his manuscript, into his history, into his life story.
"Mountolive" (Book 3) came as a surprise, the narrator is no where to be found, and we finally have a name for him "Darley". He is described as "a good fellow, gentle and resigned, with a shyness that goes with great emotions imperfectly kept under control". And suddenly our narrative is insignificant and has no effect on events, he is no more the center of the universe.
I remember the event (Book 1 or 2) when Justine faces here harasser, for whom she carries such anger and pain that seemed to possess her and her life for years, and suddenly he do not even remember the event. It has slipped from is memory as insignificant, while the event consumed her and so many other people around her for years. How invested can a person be in an aspect of life where he has the illusion that other people are sharing the emotion and being consumed in it while the truth is in another story we are just as insignificant as Darley is in Mountolive's story.
I still have a bit og Mountolive and the whole book of Clea.
This is what jWoman has to say for now.
