Justine

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Haag, Michael (2006). "Only the City is Real: Lawrence Durrell's Journey to Alexandria". Alif. 26: 39–47. I had lost the will to live, gazing in a desultory, yet artistically languid, manner into my vacant subconscious and whiling away the taedium vitae with stray girls. This was the unpromising material on which Melissa poured her shimmering nectar. For a week, her former lover, a bestial furrier, stalked the streets, intending to shoot me. But this was Alexandria, where everything was over-analysed under the sun's burning zenith and nothing really happened. Unfortunately. The International Lawrence Durrell Society A non-profit educational organization promoting the works and study of Lawrence Durrell You might have guessed it was Justine I once loved," Clea later wrote to me. "She has extinguished her sexuality and is working on a kibbutz. Melissa has died of cancer, having given birth to Nessim's star-crossed child. Can we be friends?" This is my ideal book; an interesting story in a fascinating locale, plenty of philosophy and poetic prose. The words Durrell used were like poetry and left me stunned. His characters are so well-developed, which maybe makes this one stand out to me a bit more than those in Anais Nin books (I do find their styles similar and I can see why Nin admired him so much). The characters seemed so real to me, one of the most interesting being Scobie:

Sertoli, Giuseppe. Lawrence Durrell. Civilta Letteraria Del Novecento: Sezione Inglese—Americana 6. Milano: Mursia, 1967. The biggest problem, however, is the theme of the book itself. Or perhaps not the theme, but the recurring elements. In brief, our protagonist cheats on his girlfriend Melissa with Justine, who is in turn cheating on her husband Nessim. So far, so standard. The difficulty comes when our unnamed protagonist and Justine spend much of their time lamenting their infidelity, but unable to help themselves. Durrell is clearly trying to make some philosophical statements about love and life, but I simply felt that the narrator and Justine were fairly shallow people that I would not much like.Drama Shakespeare Other Drama Other Poetry Junior Classics Young Adult Classics Collections& Sets Unabridged Around this event, dazed and preoccupied, the lover moves examining his or her own experience; her gratitude alone, stretching away towards a mistaken donor, creates the illusion that she communicates with her fellow, but this is false. The loved object is simply one that has shared an experience at the same moment of time, narcissistically; and the desire to be near the beloved object is at first not due to the idea of possessing it, but simply to let the two experiences compare themselves, like reflections in different mirrors. Durrell supported his writing by working for many years in the Foreign Service of the British government. His sojourns in various places during and after World War II (such as his time in Alexandria, Egypt) inspired much of his work. He married four times, and had a daughter with each of his first two wives. The character of Justine – who is portrayed by Durrell as alluring, seductive, mournful, and prone to dark, cryptic pronouncements – has been described by critics as the centrifugal force of the novel. [1] The narrator and Justine embark on a secretive, torrid love affair. As the adulterous lovers attempt to conceal their growing passions from Justine's husband Nessim, who is also a friend of the narrator, the resulting love triangle grows increasingly desperate and dangerous, with the narrator fearing at the book's climax that Nessim is trying to arrange to have him killed. [2] It’s probably one of the best well written books I have ever read. Durrell’s mastery of the word is indisputable. Surreal descriptions of place, evocative and provocative, tinged with poetic melancholy.

Durrell to Henry Miller: "Gypsy Cohen provides a cyclone every day with a real generous and mad beauty which is touching and exciting." A longtime smoker, Durrell suffered from emphysema for many years. He died of a stroke at his house in Sommières in November 1990, and was buried in the churchyard of the Chapelle St-Julien de Montredon in Sommières.That Nessim had her watched, I for a long time doubted. She was too protean. Yet this was all just an overture to our friendship disintegrating into a ravenous sexuality. We could not stop ourselves. We spoke in French, with each kiss a painful sunrise. She was as angry as a mad demon. "You thought I simply wanted to make love," she shouted. We quailed with melodramatic intensity.

During World War Two, Durrell served as a press attaché to the British embassies, first in Cairo and then Alexandria. While in Alexandria he met Eve (Yvette) Cohen (1918–2004), a Jewish Alexandrian. She inspired his character Justine in The Alexandria Quartet. In 1947, after his divorce from Nancy was completed, Durrell married Eve Cohen, with whom he had been living since 1942. [14] The couple's daughter, Sappho Jane, was born in Oxfordshire in 1951, [15] and named after the ancient Greek poet Sappho. [16] Raper, Julius Rowan, et al, eds. Lawrence Durrell: Comprehending the Whole. Columbia: U of Missouri P, 1995. One can return to them time and time again in memory, or [use] them as a fund upon which to build the part of one's life which is writing." Nicholas Boulton offers a masterful performance of this first volume of Lawrence Durrell’s famed Alexandria Quartet. Boulton’s rich voice, whether persuasive with seduction or throaty with frustration, captures the experience of an unnamed narrator as he succumbs to the charms of 1940s Alexandria, Egypt, and a few of its most alluring denizens – the enigmatic ‘Jewess’, Justine; her Coptic Christian husband, Nessim; Balthasar, a master of Kabbalah; and Melissa, the narrator’s tragic girlfriend. Driven by character and description, the astonishing prose bursts with such images as ‘the shops filling and emptying like lungs in the Rue des Soeurs’ and ‘far from the lime-laden dust of those summer afternoons’. All this, plus a story of misplaced passion, Boulton savours and delivers with crisp enunciation and an appreciation that keeps one listening. a b Jay Rayner (14 September 1991). "Inside Story: Daddy Dearest - The writer Lawrence Durrell cast a long, dark shadow over the short and troubled life of his daughter, Sappho". The Guardian. London . Retrieved 13 October 2020– via Google Groups.Gifford, James (30 July 2004). "Lawrence Durrell: Text, Hypertext, Intertext". Agora: An Online Graduate Journal . Retrieved 14 October 2007.

Mountolive, the third volume, is told in the third individual, inferring it is the "genuine" viewpoint on the story. It portrays David Mountolive's initial life in Egypt and kinship with Nessim's family. A juvenile man, Mountolive utilizes Leila as his dream, and they compare after an undertaking as he progresses his political profession. In Egypt, Mountolive, now a Minister, contracts Pursewarden as his associate, disregarding admonitions that Pursewarden is declining to recognize Nessim's enemy of English thoughts. Pursewarden submits suicide and Mountolive scrambles to act against his companions and repudiate his faithfulness. Leila intercedes to encourage her family, yet Mountolive is disturbed by her. Nessim and Justine now live in neediness and the Egyptian government brutalizes Narouz. The volume closes with Nessim sitting alongside his killed sibling's box, considering his misinformed aspirations.

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Haag, Michael. Alexandria: City of Memory. London and New Haven: Yale U P, 2004. [Intertwined biographies of Lawrence Durrell, E. M. Forster and Constantine Cavafy in Alexandria.] Living on this bare promontory, snatched every night from darkness by Arcturus, far from the lime-laden dust of those summer afternoons, I see at last that none of us is properly to be judged for what happened in the past. It is the city which should be judged though we, its children, must pay the price.