This week's book is "Justine," the first volume of British writer Lawrence Durrell's classic The Alexandria Quartet. First published in 1957, "Justine" and its companion novels have acquired somewhat of a cult following over the years.
On the surface, the book tells the story of a quartet of lovers in Alexandria, Egypt in the years immediately preceding the Second World War. On the one hand, we have Justine, an exotic Jewess with a vague but tragic past, married to Nessim, a handsome and vaguely mysterious Coptic Christian. On the other, we have Melissa, the consumptive cabaret dancer of Greek origin who falls in love with the Narrator, an Irish schoolteacher whose name we never learn and whose real identity remains a cipher. Through a series of betrayals and adulterous liaisons intermixed with rhapsodic descriptions of the Levant and the seething, vaguely menacing and hyper-sexualized atmosphere of Alexandria in the 1930s, the reader isn't presented so much with a traditional story, but with a series of gauzy perceptions and stunning imagery, philosophical dispositions on the nature of love, sex, marriage, and the Kabbalah, and an intricacy of puzzle pieces that, by novel's end, really don't quite all fit together.
This last point, however, is by no means a criticism. We get the sense as we turn the last page that the Narrator has deliberately kept certain truths concealed--perhaps out of ignorance himself (which calls to mind the age-old question about the reliability of first-person narratives) or from the mere fact that these characters--Justine, Nessim, Melissa, and the Narrator--in addition to the studied and colorful supporting cast, are simply unknowable...to the Narrator, to the reader, and to themselves.
Of course this is the first in a series. The second novel, "Balthazar," is purported to be told from the perspective of one of "Justine's" peripheral characters. I haven't read it yet, but will report back soon.
What I found so captivating about this novel is Mr. Durrell's writing. His sentences exude an erotic languor that sucks the reader in with an almost hypnotic power. Each word feels meticulously and perfectly chosen. While the novel is relatively brief at 250 pages, the narrative scope is epic while still being quietly intimate. A case in point, describing the tortured agony of Nessim's almost obsessive love for his wife Justine, a woman seemingly incapable of being faithful to him:
Of course this is the unhappiest love-relationship of which a human being is capable--weighed down by something as heartbreaking as the post-coital sadness which clings to every endearment, which lingers like a sediment in the clear waters of a kiss.
The novel is comprised of many such beautifully-rendered passages. While occasionally the beauty of the prose veers a little too much towards the poetic, I found myself going back and rereading whole sections not because I wasn't understanding it (though I'll admit there were a few instances that had me scratching my head in perplexity) but for the sheer joy of hearing and reading Durrell's descriptions out loud.
"Justine" is a novel to be savored and read at leisure. It presents for the reader a sepia-toned picture postcard of an exotic time and place that hints at the darkness and corruption of a pre-Arab Spring Egypt, though an argument can be made that things haven't changed all that much today. The menace is there, but it is the beauty that shines through.
Ciao.
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