The lush and sensuous series consists of Justine(1957) Balthazar(1958). In 1998, the Modern Library ranked The Alexandria Quartet number 70 on its list of the 100 best English-language novels of the 20th century. Lawrence Durrells series of four novels set in Alexandria, Egypt during the 1940s. In a 1959 Paris Review interview, Durrell described the ideas behind the Quartet in terms of a convergence of Eastern and Western metaphysics, based on Einstein's overturning of the old view of the material universe, and Freud's doing the same for the concept of stable personalities, yielding a new concept of reality. Darley attempts to reconcile himself to the end of his affair with the dark, passionate Justine Hosnani - setting alight. The book is in the tradition, too, of Norman Douglas's SOUTH WIND, a book about how not Alexandria, but Capri, makes its characters lose their moral bearings, and how losing their morality is actually the best thing that could happen to the characters. The Quartet 's first three books offer the same sequence of events through several points of view, allowing individual perspectives of a single set of events. The Alexandria Quartet is a ghost story in many ways, come to think of it. The fourth book is set six years later.Īs Durrell explains in his preface to Balthazar, the four novels are an exploration of relativity and the notions of continuum and subject–object relation, with modern love as the theme. If The Black Book has a special interest both as a kind of spiritual. A critical and commercial success, the first three books present three perspectives on a single set of events and characters in Alexandria, Egypt, before and during the Second World War. Paperback International Edition, September 22, 2020. The Alexandria Quartet is a tetralogy of novels by British writer Lawrence Durrell, published between 19.

The alexandria quartet book