Justine's story is starting to take a more prominent place with the accounts told by Balthazar in this book. Because of this, I liked Balthazar even more. As you learn the details you didn't know and get to know the characters better, you are drawn deeper into the story. I will continue to read the series, and the character I have been most curious about since the first book is Clea, whose knots will be untangled in the last book of the series.

I find myself constantly eager to turn the page, eager to discover what will happen next in Justine's journey. Balthazar's perspective adds a new layer of depth to the narrative, making it even more engaging.

I can't wait to see how Clea's story unfolds and how all the loose ends will be tied up in the final installment. The anticipation is building, and I know that this series has more surprises and revelations in store for me.

Durrell truly begins to hit his stride with the second book in the Quartet.

The narrator, and I finally discovered his name (though I won't spoil it here, as it's not overly crucial), realizes that the story presented in Justine is far from the complete account. In fact, his role to play is entirely different from what he initially thought.

While Justine had a somewhat claustrophobic atmosphere, Durrell now starts to paint a much bigger and more vivid picture. This brings the exotic nature of Alexandria right to the forefront. We still encounter the people introduced in Justine, but now the city itself begins to assert its presence in a more significant way.

It's important to be patient with these books. Once you manage to get a feel for Durrell's unique prose style, the story flows along quite smoothly and engagingly.

You'll find yourself immersed in the complex web of characters and the rich tapestry of Alexandria, eager to uncover more of the secrets and mysteries that Durrell has in store.

I cannot say that I forgot the city, but I let the memory of it sleep.

Yet of course, it was always there, as it always will be, hanging in the mind like the mirage which travellers so often see.

Now in the spring come the long calms, the tideless, scentless days of premonition. The sea tames itself and becomes attentive. Soon the cicadas will bring in their crackling music, background to the shepherd’s dry flute among the rocks. The scrambling tortoise and the lizard are our only companions.

Her mind had been formed by solitude, enriched by books which she could only discuss in letters to friends in remote places, could only read in the privacy of the harim. Her letters had become her very life, and in the writing of them she had begun to suffer from that curious sense of distorted reality which writers have when they are dealing with real people. In the years of writing to Mountolive, for example, she had so to speak re-invented him so successfully that he existed for her now not so much as a real human being but as a character out of her own imagination.

The night was hot and still, and the scent of magnolia blossom came up to the balcony in little drifts and eddies of air which made the candles flutter and dance. He was gnawed by irresolution.

Nessim was busy with his memories of those youthful nights camped out here under a sky hoary with stars, in a booming tent pitched under Vega. The whole desert spread around them like an empty room. How did one come to forget the greatest of one’s experiences? It was all lying there like a piano that one could play but which one had somehow forgotten to touch for years. He was irradiated by the visions of his inner eye and followed Narouz blindly. He saw them in all that immensity — two spots like pigeons flying in an empty sky.

Where must one look for justifications? Only I think to the facts themselves. For they might enable me to see now a little further into the central truth of this enigma called ‘love’. I see the image of it receding and curling away from me in an infinite series like the waves of the sea. Or, colder than a dead moon, rising up over the dreams and illusions I fabricated from it. But like the real moon, always keeping one side of the truth hidden from me, the nether side of a beautiful dead star.

‘To intercalate realities’ writes Balthazar ‘is the only way to be faithful to Time, for at every moment in Time the possibilities are endless in their multiplicity. Life consists in the act of choice. The perpetual reservations of judgement and the perpetual choosing.’

From the vantage-point of this island I can see it all in its doubleness, in the intercalation of fact and fancy, with new eyes. And re-reading, re-working reality in the light of all I now know, I am surprised to find that my feelings themselves have changed, have grown, have deepened even. Perhaps then the destruction of my private Alexandria was necessary. Perhaps buried in all this there lies the germ and substance of a truth — time’s usufruct — which, if I can accommodate it, will carry me a little further in what is really a search for my proper self. We shall see.

A whole new world of experience stands between us. How could you know all this?

The pregnant Alexandría confounds reality with fiction, time with truth, and believes that everything can be true at the same time.

Due to so much ambiguity, she agrees to let Darley collect the Comment written in capital letters that Balthazar makes about his manuscript, even though she knows she won't like that point of view.

She had already been warned by the kind Clea that confusing characters with human beings would bring her headaches, but now it is Darley who takes care of Melissa and Nessim's daughter and still knows nothing about Justine after she fled after the duck hunt.

Because perhaps that dawn, two equally true and wrong destinies were written for both of them, and neither would come to fruition because time, like the universe, never stops expanding as if, suddenly, one of the characters in the manuscript knew something about what was going to happen.

Do we really know how to differentiate between imagining, inventing, and creating? Are we sure that things happen exactly as we see them and as they are told to us?

Because perhaps it is not Justine who needs to be saved in this story, but Nessim, who on two occasions is able to come out scratched but unharmed from a love that does not seem to be the right one, at least in Balthazar's mind, in this perspective.

Naruz, Nessim's brother, on the night of the carnival party, where everything is confused and everyone wears more masks than the city of Alexandria usually does, decides to save his brother's life by trying to end Justine's life.

But destiny has another idea in mind and whispers to Justine to exchange her ring before midnight. Only in this way can both of them be saved, and even Naruz will see that act of adoration he feels for his brother rewarded in some way.

As always in love, some win and others lose, and only the smartest manage to stay alive. Nessim continues with his secrets while looking for Justine's lost daughter.

Justine believes that Nessim hides too many things from her, especially about her daughter. Melissa is present for everyone but herself, and Purserwarden tries to capture the intricacies of those characters as if looking for a literary dissection to be able to understand them and himself, and perhaps this last feat is what puts an end to his life.

While Balthazar focuses Darley's gaze on a Justine that he thought he knew until now, although much less than he thought....