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    Justine
    Justine
    Justine
    Audiobook (abridged)3 hours

    Justine

    Written by Lawrence Durrell

    Narrated by Nigel Anthony

    4/5

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    About this audiobook

    Justine is the first volume in The Alexandria Quartet, four interlinked novels set in the sensuous, hot environment of Alexandria just before the Second World War. Within this polyglot setting of richly idiosyncratic characters is Justine, wild and intense, wife to the wealthy business man Nessim, a mari complaisant. Her emotional and sexual wildness fuels a highly-charged atmosphere which, caught famously by Durrell’s poetic language, made Justine (1957), and the three novels that complete the Quartet – Balthazar (1958), Mountolive (1958), and Clea (1960) both a critical and a popular success.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherNaxos Audiobooks
    Release dateMar 10, 1995
    ISBN9789629545857
    Author

    Lawrence Durrell

    Born in Jalandhar, British India, in 1912 to Indian-born British colonials, Lawrence Durrell was a critically hailed and beloved novelist, poet, humorist, and travel writer best known for the Alexandria Quartet novels, which were ranked by the Modern Library as among the greatest works of English literature in the twentieth century. A passionate and dedicated writer from an early age, Durrell’s prolific career also included the groundbreaking Avignon Quintet, whose first novel, Monsieur (1974), won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, and whose third novel, Constance (1982), was nominated for the Booker Prize. He also penned the celebrated travel memoir Bitter Lemons of Cyprus (1957), which won the Duff Cooper Prize. Durrell corresponded with author Henry Miller for forty-five years, and Miller influenced much of his early work, including a provocative and controversial novel, The Black Book (1938). Durrell died in France in 1990.  

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    Reviews for Justine

    4/5

    534 ratings31 reviews

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    • 4/5
      Durrell's writing is beautiful but this book is not for everyone. It is mostly a monologue where he uses his words to create an atmosphere that is pure magic Some of his sentences will stay with you for a long time. After reading Justine, I feel a need to go on and read the rest of the quartet. His writing is very addictive.
    • 5/5
      Durrell's story is a fantastically compelling one told from different points of view (through the four novels in the Quartet). We get a real sense of what it must have been like to live in Egypt, and we get to meet a wonderfully complex set of characters (and see them from different angles). Love unifies/pervades these books - some of it is sensual, some of it is Platonic.
    • 4/5
      While I only gleaned over it, I must say it is a great story and worthy of listening to the full reading. The reader here in this abridged version is excellent.
    • 5/5
      Justine is the first novel in a four volume set known as "The Alexandria Quartet." Lawrence Durrell sets the stage with a description of the behaviors and thoughts of his characters that are determined by the cultural history and current settings of the ancient city in Egypt. The acts and interactions of the international cast, including Arabs, Jews, Africans, and Anglos, are not the results of free will, but are reactions to Justine who is affected by her life long residence in Alexandria. Justine is the flawed, sensual heart of her social group, married to and in love with Nessim but too impulsively driven to find self acceptance to remain faithful to him. Her faith is in the life of the city that she believes can reveal her identity if she can only find the key, like finding a small precise key to a beautiful and intricate pocket watch. The urgency is to find the key before her time of manic energy runs out. Durrell writes, "Somewhere in the heart of experience there is order and coherence which we might surprise if we are attentive enough, or patient enough. Will there be time?" The order and coherence of Alexandria is amoral so Justine's understanding of herself cannot be constricted by standard rules of behavior. To love Justine is to hate oneself because she embodies qualities one can never possess, just like the city that created her. For Justine self possession is finding meaning in her unconscious identification with the city, acting out in cycles of irrational sensual and destructive acts, like the repeating cycles of the history of Alexandria. I highly recommend this novel that details the futile attempt of Justine to restructure her past. She attaches to other residents of Alexandria who are seeking answers to their own mysteries in hedonism, religion, cultural identification, and mysticism. She wreaks havoc by showing them there is no apparent structure to life and love, there is no personality. There is only the temporary routine of habits of behavior and thought. The answer may be to simply surrender without qualification to the passion of the city and look for patterns of emotion.
    • 4/5
      Jazz songs often follow a theme, a melody and chord progression usually established in the first 12 measures of the song. Once announced, a musician will dabble and improvise with the theme, riffing this way and that, changing the key or the timing, adding and subtracting notes and tones from the theme, but always returning to it in some form. Anyone unfamiliar with improvisational jazz need only call up an internet sample of Miles Davis’ seminal tune “So What” on his “Kind of Blue” album to understand the principal. [Justine] is Lawrence Durrell’s announcement of theme that he improvises around in the remaining novels of his [Alexandria Quartet]. [Justine] opens with our narrator, unnamed until subsequent novels, looking back over his tumultuous life in Alexandria from the safe confines of a small Greek island. His principal company on the island as he reminisces is a young girl; the daughter of a former love, Melissa, a dancer and prostitute, now deceased. In telling Melissa’s story, he must also tell of his affair with Justine, the headstrong and sometimes cruel wife of Nessim, his friend. And he must tell of his half-hearted attempt to spy on Justine for the English embassy as she attends secret meetings studying the Cabala with the enigmatic psychiatrist Balthazar. The narrator finishes the story certain in his understanding of all the events that surrounded him through this period in his life, sure that he was the master of his own destiny in all things.Durrell’s story drips with the sights and smells and colors of Alexandria and the Egyptian desert. Poetic throughout, the language Durrell uses to tell his story is evocative and lyrical. At the completion of the novel, most readers could walk away fulfilled and satisfied. But those who chose to read into the further novels of the [Alexandria Quartet] will learn that all was not as it seemed for our narrator. [Justine] could stand alone as a complete and completely realized story. But its true value is only appreciated in reading the rest of Durrell’s series. In these later riffs on Durrell’s theme, our narrator, finally introduced as Darley, finds that all was not as he supposed.Bottom Line: A poetic and evocative book; one that stand’s on its own as a completely realized novel or as the introduction to a much more complex and interesting story.4 bones!!!!
    • 5/5
      I loved it. What a nice read. I felt connected to the characters.
    • 4/5
      I found the writing and the presentation by the narrator overwhelmingly beautiful. How sad I was to find out that it had been abridged.
    • 5/5
      Justine is a must read, a classic, a wonderful novel.
      The main character of this novel, the 1st of a Quartet, is Alexandria, the ancient Mediterranean city, just before WWII.
      The reader will be introduced to Justine, the mesmerizing Jewish woman, who is a central character of the city. Through her story, narrated by her young British lover, from the height of Justine's power to her demise, Alexandria is seen as a cosmopolitan city in the verge of tectonic changes. The city allows Justine to deploy all her potential and at the same time crashes her and all her inhabitants.
      You wiil also be introduced in this part to other characters who will in the following parts impersonate other versions of the city. Not better not worse. Always described vividly, humanely.
    • 5/5
      How do you review, how do you qualify, how do you classify an experience like "Justine"? It's my introduction to Durrell as a writer, and a turning point in my adventures in literature.

      Durrell feverishly and uncompromisingly explores the inner-workings of his half-dozen lead characters, filtered through the locational limitations of their chosen city - Alexandria - and describes how each person is constantly fettered by their own past, but also their social and societal contexts, their fears and self-doubts, and their attempts at interaction. It would be easy simply to quote endless snippets of Durrell's writing here, to explain his genius. But this seems useless. Read the book yourself instead.

      It's an exhausting experience, this much is true. Emotionally, linguistically, even - in some unusual way - physically. At the same time, this snappy (200 page) book never feels dense. Despite his closely-textured style, the reader can race through this experience, never feeling daunted by the words at hand.

      Are there parts of Durrell and his style that I question? Certainly. Women, homosexuals, children, people of different colours and religions... they're all given equal weight as characters, certainly, but sometimes they're more easily defined by their different element. (Durrell's feelings on sex and love are complex, but at times it seems like he sees gay men as simply horny men who have forsaken love for the easier - but undoubtedly loveless - sexual interaction that comes with men. And his characters constantly referring to children as "it" annoys me, even though I accept it was a commonplace of the era.) One could also ask questions about his interactions with the lower classes. Durrell's Alexandria pulses with life, this is true, and his descriptive passages are viscerally evocative. However, his characters rarely engage with work or real life; they seem instead to drift through at their own pace. Perhaps this is being too specific - after all, why should the novel focus on the narrator's teaching career when it is exploring his relationship with Justine? Or perhaps it is being churlish - by the inverse token, "Les Miserables" doesn't feature many sympathetic or realistically-drawn rich people: that would be against its mandate! So, I'll let it slide.

      Durrell can be a challenging read for someone of my generation. First, much of his speech and use of words is archaic (when was the last time anyone used "terrible" to mean anything other than "of poor quality"?). Second, he had me running for the dictionary sometimes as much as four times in one sentence! (Not that I'd ever complain about learning new words or being challenged, it just unnerves me as someone who has always prided myself on my vocabulary). Thirdly, and perhaps most importantly, he comes from a very different generation and - more importantly - was writing for people like himself: upper-middle-class folk who has plenty of leisure time, who had undoubtedly travelled Europe and/or Northern Africa, who had at least a workable knowledge of three or four Romance languages, and who had a thorough knowledge of mythological, literary, and cultural references. It struck me the other day, while reading "Justine" on the train, that our society has segregated far more of late. The middle class no longer have this knowledge; it is reserved only for the few who develop a passion for it, and the few who are born to it. I almost fit that bill, so I was less challenged than many readers may be, but it's certainly clear that Durrell's target audience no longer exists, and that these books - written a scant 55 years ago - will need to be quite exhaustively annotated for future generations, if they are to remain in the public eye at all.

      "Justine" still has much to offer. Its depictions of Alexandria, oozing sweat and life and dust. The broken reminiscences of the narrator, attempting to reconcile his notions of love and sex with his experiences of same. The fascinating complexities of Nessim and Melissa, of Scobie and Clea, even of the seemingly one-note Capodistria. And, of course, the eponymous portrait. I'm assuming that that fractured portraiture is Durrell's ultimate endgame, as I will discover when I read the remainder of the Alexandria Quartet. Justine is seen refracted through so many pairs of eyes in this novel, and each heart, each mind teases out different pieces of information. None of them are wrong, per se, but none of them are absolutely right. Durrell is asking us to consider which parts of a person's dimensions are truly the essence of themselves. After all, we all wear so many masks in life that these elements threaten to overtake, and, of course, we are many different - yet truthful - things to many different people. Beyond this, we evolve and change with each experience in life. And finally, there is the fact that sometimes our minds do hold breathtaking contradictions, some that we cannot quite understand ourselves.

      For such a messy question, Durrell has found quite an elegant attempt at an answer.
    • 3/5
      “I tried to tell myself how stupid this all 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. And yet somewhere else, at a deeper level, I seemed to recognize that the experience upon which I had embarked would have the deathless finality of a lesson learned.”

      Set in Egypt in the 1930s, this book is about an unnamed man having an affair with the titular Justine, though he professes to love his long-term girlfriend, Melissa. Justine is married to Nessim, and she says he loves her husband, but she carries on with multiple lovers as if she cannot control this part of her nature. Jealousy is a main theme.

      It is broken into four segments. The first two were difficult to get through, basically describing the decadent life of expats in Alexandria. This type of subject matter rarely appeals to me, and I almost gave up on it. The third becomes more focused, as Nessim finds out about Justine’s affair. The fourth segment is outstanding and the best part of the book.

      It is ornately written, which was distracting at first, but I came to appreciate it by the end. Speaking of the end, the characters finally realize that their actions have repercussions, so it has more substance. It took me forever to read this relatively short book (250 pages). I can appreciate its literary merit, but I am also glad to be finished.
    • 5/5
      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 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?
    • 4/5
      I very much enjoyed the dream-like but engrossing introduction to the Alexandria Quartet. This first dip into the experiment in Point of view, did what it was supposed to do; it drew me into the other three books, and got my mind played with by Lawrence Durrell's masterpiece. The totality should never be passed up by aspiring writers, and even the casual reader should be acquainted with this lovely book.
    • 5/5
      Goodreads wants to know what I learned from this book? I suppose I learned that self-conscious allusions and internal textual play can go on forever, and books titled after Sade characters actually don't have a lot of sex...
    • 3/5
      Maybe at another time in my life I would have rated this book higher than 3 stars out of five. Some of the writing is magical and evocative and the structure of the novel is rather unusual. For its time (1957) I'm sure it was daring because of the sexual frankness. Nevertheless I wasn't caught up by the story.The unnamed narrator writes about his life in Alexandria Egypt before World War II. He is English probably although that is never completely specified. He supported himself by teaching and he was trying to write in his spare time. He doesn't actually have much spare time because he hobnobs with the expat community. He has a girlfriend, Melissa, who is a dancer at a nightclub but he falls in love with Justine, the wife of a rich banker. Justine has a history of sexual affairs; her first husband wrote a book about her and her unfaithfulness. Our narrator has almost memorized the whole book. Justine's present husband suspects she is having an affair but doesn't seem to know with whom. Various other personages circle through the pages. This book is the first of four books about the same group of people so perhaps some of those people will become more important in other books. I don't think I am sufficiently interested in them to read the other books of the quartet.
    • 4/5
      These are the moments which are not calculable, and cannot be assessed in words; they live on in the solution of memory, like wonderful creatures, unique of their own kind, dredged up from the floors of some unexplored ocean.

      Full review of sorts will ensue when the tetralogy is completed.
    • 4/5
      Story is set in Alexandra, Egypt, pre world war II. The narrator is an Irish school teacher. It is a story of a love triangle, but also a story of Alexandra. The triangles are the 1) school teacher and his mistress, Melissa and Justine 2) Justine, Nessim, and the school teacher, and one could also add Melissa and Nessim bonded together against Justine and the school teacher. The story is more of character study that any plot. There is a bit of plot here and there. There is reference to an act of sexual abuse against Justine in her younger years. There is some espionage and there is the hunting scene. Mostly it is a character study with Alexandra as probably the main character. Durrell Legacy: modernistic, prewar story of love, sex. Style/structure: epiphany style of James Joyce. As the New Yorker article states; memory has free range, no formal attempt is made at structure or even at rendering the story easy to follow. It takes a great deal of work to read this relatively short work by page count. Durrell is a lyrist and each word seems to be purposely chosen, often requiring looking up (at least for me). Thank goodness for Kindle dictionary. Sex is a big part of this book yet the author does not force a lot of detail on the reader but still it is enough to before and after details and it is used as cover up for espionage, personal sacrifice, neediness, and desire for power. (Foster). There really is no healthy sexual encounters in this book. While this is a story where characters are described as Libertines and are on their own, as far as adulthood, it is also a story where the characters are coming to age. Melissa, Justine and our narrator.
    • 4/5
      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 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.
    • 5/5
      For a long time, I thought I might never enjoy this novel. I've picked it up about once a decade, since the 1980's. Each time it seemed opaque, slow paced, and florid. Slowly, over the years, like a tree trunk, my taste in and capacity for literature widened. About eight years ago, I read and enjoyed Durrell's The Dark Labyrinth, and then, The Avignon Quintet. I found that research on Durrell's life, his thoughts on writing, relativity, Freud, and Gnosticism helped unlock his work. And last week, I thought I'd give the quartet one last try. Justine opened for me, at last, like a cactus flower. As lyrical, and perhaps overlauded, as Durrell's prose is, it contains numerous remarkable aphoristic insights. And just when you're about to be lulled into an opiate dream state by the lyricism, Durrell wakens the analytic part of your mind, with a stunningly apt analogy about a character or situation. In some ways, the novel, stylistically, is much like the current Netflix series, Sense8. Both are visual, sensual, and exotic. Both are slow to reveal their truths. Both scatter their focus, and yet both are periodically, and unpredictably captivating. And too, both Justine and Sense8, are shadowed by the Gnostic suggestion that things are not what they seem, and perhaps set in motion by evil.
    • 4/5
      Near the beginning of Justine, Durrell has his narrator raise a question that he must know will sooner or later occur to his readers: “I tried to tell myself how stupid all 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.” The narrator, an unnamed Irishman, a teacher and would-be writer, is in love with Melissa Artemis, a dancer previously kept by a rich furrier named Cohen, and also with Justine, the wife of the rich Nessim Hosnani, who becomes the narrator’s friend. Themes introduced early are the city of Alexandria as a causative actor, pulling the strings of the characters, and “prism-sightedness”—a multiple view of the same person or the same event from different angles, underlined by the frequent motif of multiple mirrors and by Durrell’s use of a novel and various diaries to supplement the narrator’s limited view of his experiences.The narrator shares a flat with Georges Pombal, a consulate official who occasionally provides him with a prostitute. The successful novelist Pursewarden lives down the hall, and it is in his apartment that the narrator meets Melissa, whom he nurses back to something like health before they become lovers. In the second section of the book Balthazar is introduced, a scholarly homosexual doctor who presides overthe Cabal, a meeting of enthusiasts in Hermetic literature, where Nessim, Justine, and the rich, sexually-obsessed Capodistria are all in attendance. Pombal gives the narrator a novel, Moeurs, by Jacob Arnauti, who was married to Justine when she was very young and who has written this novel about her, providing another view of Justine to complement that of the narrator and those of Nessim and Balthazar and the one she provides herself in her diaries. Yet another character is the barber Mnemjian, whom the narrator calls “the archives of the city.”Durrell introduces the dim, opportunistic character of Scobie so that the narrator can be hired by him, ludicrously, to spy on Balthazar’s Cabal. Scobie wants the narrator to break the “code” of Balthazar’s postcard messages, which are not really messages at all. Balthazar reproduces on cards to his correspondents a chessboard-like figure, with Greek letters spelling out in boustrophedon form the supposed seventy-two names of God, a key concept of the Kabbalah that Balthazar’s group studies. The point of the Cabal in the book seems to be thematic: the puzzle of Hermetic literature is a parallel for what is in Justine the oddly gnostic exercise of human love. No one in the book knows quite what to make of either, except perhaps Balthazar, who is wisely above both. He is a homosexual who forms no lasting love connections; because of his inversion, he says, he “has been spared an undue interest in love.” And he does not look for ultimate answers in Hermetic literature, either; the Cabal, he says, “posits nothing beyond a science of Right Attention.”The Mareotis, the lake that forms the southern boundary of Alexandria, is mentioned often throughout the book, and the climax comes in the annual shooting party on the Mareotis that Nessim organizes. The narrator accepts Nessim’s invitation, despite Justine’s objections. Capodistria, who is accidentally killed in the shooting, is apparently revealed as the molester of Justine when she was very young. Justine leaves Alexandria, and so does the narrator. She goes to Palestine and he to northern Egypt to teach in a Catholic school. But he returns to Alexandria when Melissa dies, and he takes the child Melissa had with Nessim to live with him as he exiles himself on an island in the Mediterranean to record these Alexandrian experiences. The book, like Justine (according to the narrator) lacks a sense of humor, aside from a few comic moments provided by Scobie. But Durrell succeeds in investing the actions of these characters, and their actions are mainly couplings, with mystery, or at least with doubt that we ever have the true or the complete story.
    • 4/5
      The first volume of Durrell's Alexandria Quartet is very similar to how readers and critics describe Proust, in that the narrative chronology and tone is based on memory, and contains its qualities of nostalgic inquiry and lamentation. The memory of the narrator dwells, poetically, on the love object of Justine and on the love object of the city of Alexandria itself. The novel avoids a linear plot and the story is given through a filter of emotion rather than action. All of that happens in the narrative is covered by a sorrowful veil of reflection. This style both demands and exiles the reader's attention simultaneously, casting them into a sort of dreamy ponderance in relation to the text and its characters. That is both advantageous and slightly detrimental for the overall enjoyment of Durrell's novel. I will be curious in successive books of the Quartet to see how tone and style is altered by point of view.
    • 5/5
      Due to my anal retentiveness and insistence on finishing most everything I start, I’m sometimes not as ambitious when it comes to picking up really big books. “Justine” isn’t itself that large, but it is just the first volume in a 1,000-page tetralogy. And it’s spectacular.It reads as an odd mélange of “A Sheltering Sky” mixed with the strongly internal character development of writers like Woolf and Proust. As in “A Sheltering Sky,” the most important character isn’t a person at all, but a place. Alexandria, along with haunting presence of its patron saint and poet Constantine Cafavy, wholly perfuse the novel. The writing took me some time to get used to given its highly experimental, lyric form. At first, Durrell’s style certainly seems histrionic and overly wrought, like something embarrassing out of a soap opera. It, much like the city itself, eventually starts to grow on you. Sometime during the second half, I came to see Durrell’s prose as not lurid and purple, but almost epiphanic. There is an epigram of Freud opening the novel that says, “I am accustoming myself to the idea of regarding every sexual act as a process in which four persons are involved. We shall have a lot to discuss about that.” This, in a word, sums up much of the novel. The narrator, who remains unnamed throughout, befriends a tubercular Alexandrine prostitute named Melissa, but begins an affair with a woman named Justine, who is already married to the wealthy Coptic Christian Nessim. The attempt to hide the affair and Nessim’s growing suspicion and jealousy are what drive the novel. (It wasn’t by accident that I used the words “soap opera” above.) Durrell seems to want Alexandria to be as obscurantist and full the “Other” as possible: he puts several of the main characters in a philosophical-religious cabal, but at the end its influence and importance hasn’t been revealed.What makes this novel truly spectacular is the language, the episodic jumps in time, the lush lyricism, and how Durrell so deftly manages to tie this all into both the city of Alexandria and the themes of passion, love, and jealousy. I’ll leave you with just a few lines from the very end, just to entice: “The cicadas are throbbing in the great plains, and the summer Mediterranean lies before me in all its magnetic blueness. Somewhere out there, beyond the mauve throbbing line of the horizon lies Africa, lies Alexandria, maintaining its tenuous grasp on one’s affections through memories which are already refunding themselves slowly into forgetfulness; memory of friends, of incidents long past. The slow unreality of time begins to grip them, blurring the outlines – so that sometimes I wonder whether these pages record the actions of real human beings or whether this is not simply the story of a few inanimate objects which precipitated drama around them – I mean a black pitch, a watch-key and a couple of dispossessed wedding-rings…”
    • 5/5
      this is absolutely everything that i look for in literature. sensual without vulgarity, poetic without pretension. such a beautiful, vivid, heavy work. and i mean a work, it is art, a beautiful work of art true poetry in prose. i find that in short stories it is easier to reach this kind of potential, so to read it in a full novel is quite delightful. yet in the midst of all this, it was such an easy read but not light. highly, highly, highly recommended.
    • 5/5
      Justine is the first novel in a four volume set known as "The Alexandria Quartet." Lawrence Durrell sets the stage with a description of the behaviors and thoughts of his characters that are determined by the cultural history and current settings of the ancient city in Egypt. The acts and interactions of the international cast, including Arabs, Jews, Africans, and Anglos, are not the results of free will, but are reactions to Justine who is affected by her life long residence in Alexandria. Justine is the flawed, sensual heart of her social group, married to and in love with Nessim but too impulsively driven to find self acceptance to remain faithful to him. Her faith is in the life of the city that she believes can reveal her identity if she can only find the key, like finding a small precise key to a beautiful and intricate pocket watch. The urgency is to find the key before her time of manic energy runs out. Durrell writes, "Somewhere in the heart of experience there is order and coherence which we might surprise if we are attentive enough, or patient enough. Will there be time?" The order and coherence of Alexandria is amoral so Justine's understanding of herself cannot be constricted by standard rules of behavior. To love Justine is to hate oneself because she embodies qualities one can never possess, just like the city that created her. For Justine self possession is finding meaning in her unconscious identification with the city, acting out in cycles of irrational sensual and destructive acts, like the repeating cycles of the history of Alexandria. I highly recommend this novel that details the futile attempt of Justine to restructure her past. She attaches to other residents of Alexandria who are seeking answers to their own mysteries in hedonism, religion, cultural identification, and mysticism. She wreaks havoc by showing them there is no apparent structure to life and love, there is no personality. There is only the temporary routine of habits of behavior and thought. The answer may be to simply surrender without qualification to the passion of the city and look for patterns of emotion.
    • 3/5
      First book in the Alexandria quartet.Experimental fiction that was reportedly a commercial and critical success when first published, it has not aged well. Some of the stylistic quirks, such as heavily quoting the words of a fictional author in the story, just seem odd, while others are just self indulgent, such as the repeated returns to quote Scobie the gay former seaman and now police officer. Still the series is impressive in the capacity to represent the same events from the perspective of different story tellers at different times, and the while thing, in my view, is not great, but a good near miss. Read June - July 2010.
    • 5/5
      I first read this book almost 40 years ago. It took several attempts to get into it, but I'm so glad I persevered because I then sat down and read all the books of the Quarter straight off. I was mesmerised by the mysterious, exotic, romantic, lyrical city of Alexandria and the events described in the books.Now I'm trying to recapture that excitement. I'm finding Justine quite hard work again, but I am steadily working may way through it because I know what lies ahead. Sometimes as I'm reading I think it's all just pretentious rubbish - Malcolm Bradbury's parody in The Faber Book of Parodies is excellent - but afterwards I always come back to the conviction that Justine is a truly exceptional book, something on a different level from most of the other books I have ever read.
    • 4/5
      "Justine" is the first of Durrrell's "Alexandria Quartet", four novels of which the first three are set more or less contemporaneously in Alexandria and a Greek island and the fourth of which is a sequel, all of them taking place juxt before and during World War II and with most of the same characters. Durrell's aim, realised with great success, was to show how our lack of knowledge and misunderstandings of people and situations can cause us to take actions which are partly or entirely inappropriate, and he does this in a way which a simple narrative could not have achieved. It isn't easy going, but it remains a monument to Durrell's genuine and deep feeling for the Mediterranean and its varied peoples.
    • 4/5
      The New York Times Book Review says Justine "Demands comparison with the very best novels of our century." The back of my copy states, "Justine has inspired an almost religious devotion among readers and critics." If that doesn't make you want to read it, nothing I write could ever convince you to pick it up. The novel is narrated by a frustrated schoolmaster in Alexandria, Egypt before World War II begins. He wants to be a writer and he has fallen neurotically in lust with Justine- a beautiful, rich, married Jewess. The problem is almost all of the characters are neurotically obsessed with Justine in one way or another. She has a very sketchy and erotic past. Justine herself is neurotic and uses the others' obsessions to satiate her own demons, emotionally destroying those involved. The plot thickens as the narrator and Justine worry that her husband, who is also the narrator's friend, knows about their affair. The city is as mesmerizing and haunting as Justine and becomes its own character in a way. The book is beautifully written, but it is not an easy read. Passages of intellectual discussion about the nature of love, relationships, guilt, philosophy, etc. dominate. There is a book within the book, which is always a sign that the reading will not be the usual beach-reading fare. And there are frequent poetic descriptions of characters and their mental states that go on for paragraphs and sometimes for pages. For example: "Frankly Scobie looks anybody's age; older than the birth of tragedy, younger than the Athenian death. Spawned in the Ark by a chance meeting and mating of the bear and the ostrich; delivered before term by the sickening grunt of the keel on Ararat. Scobie came forth from the womb in a wheel chair with rubber tyres, dressed in a deer-stalker and a red flannel binder... like a patron saint he has left little pieces of his flesh all over the world..." Another example: “The noise of her voice is jumbled in the back of his brain like the sound-track of an earthquake run backwards.”See what I mean? Beautifully written. It's even funny, but action and pace are not first and foremost in this novel. I like stuff like this, but I think it's because I was brainwashed as an English major that I'm supposed to like it. It's difficult, intellectual, and beautiful; therefore it must be good. Is it one of the best novels of the century? No. Will I end up reading the rest of The Alexandria Quartet? Probably.
    • 1/5
      1054 Justine, by Lawrence Durrell (read 30 May 1970) I know this guy, Durrell, writes well, but really how can I care what he writes about? I really don't. I recognize no truth in any of the supposedly profound insights he displays. The whole book just plain bored me. O, towards the end the story falls into place, etc., but I just cannot care about Justine, and Nessim and Melissa, and "I". I am not going to read the other three volumes in the quartet. Alexandria means nothing to me. [But I did read them in 2002!]
    • 4/5
      The first of Lawrence Durrell’s famous tetralogy, The Alexandria Quartet, “Justine” is a refreshingly archaic romance in the old-world meaning of the word. Compared to more modern exegesis of love, which tend to be fairly barbaric and/or saturated in ham-fisted prurience, Durrell writes in (and of) an era wherein love is synonymous with sadness; the inescapable solitude of the self underlies the emotional paradoxes of the novel. The cinematic, pre-war patina of exoticism/isolation lends the story a heavy-handed kind of charm, but the real pleasure comes in his jabs of hard truth and lyrical insight. It’s a beautiful little book.
    • 5/5
      Justine is an exciting love story about the Middle East that made me think about how I see things different from other people. I read the Alexander Quartet and was shocked by each perspective and realized different people have different realities. I liked the context of the story and the drama provided but most of all, I liked the different perspectives provided. Justine is just the beginning.