The Alexandrian quartet is not merely a read; it is a thrilling adventure.

The people and the city within it unfold not as mere characters in a story but as four-dimensional entities, seen from entirely different vantage points.

I have perused the quartet four times already, and I am soon planning to embark on yet another reading.

I assume I'll commence with Justine, but I've been pondering whether it might be more pleasurable to read them in the reverse of the typical order.

Having stated all this, Lawrence Durrell is not to everyone's taste. Some even prefer his brother's books, which I find irritating and trivial.

My brother dismissed his prose as being overly flowery. I can understand that. It is as lush and dense as a wild, unkempt garden.

However, for me, when executed as masterfully as it is in the quartet, that density of imagery enables me to immerse myself in the zeitgeist or perhaps the weltschmerz of the period, place, and people.

It is a unique literary experience that keeps drawing me back for more.

"Clea" is the last volume of the Alexandria Quartet. It is my favorite volume. I believe that the virtue - not the highest virtue - of Durrell is to manage in his representation various ways of approaching life. Because each character could be a representative of a certain distinctive trait, of a certain character that a human being develops.

In the entire quartet, we have Justine (the femme fatale), Melissa (the shy dancer), Clea (the intelligent painter), Nessim (the wealthy one), Narouz (the complex and peasant wealthy one), Pursewarden (the satirical writer), etc. And these are like masks that one visits, putting them on and then taking them off with a gesture of stupor. If fiction is important, it is because of the intensity that it makes us live.

But "Clea" is special for me because it delves into the world of friendship, into a kind of temporal tragedy. Because time has passed and that way of capturing it is characteristic of someone who knows what they are doing and knows where the words are going. Friendship is like a powerful stew; when drunk, one begins to question oneself, trying to justify the way one has taken it. If the subject has drunk too fast, they question why: and moreover, they tell themselves that perhaps the opposite would have been more sensible. The same in "Clea", because whoever feeds too soon on friendship understands that perhaps they should have gone carefully in those wild libations.

I leave here a link to another written piece about "Clea", where I work on the text a bit more: librosylaberintos.wordpress.com/2021/...

And I also leave the link to a video review that I did of "Clea": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-hKVd...

Best regards and take care.

Clea, the fourth and final installment in Lawrence Durrell's Alexandria Quartet, takes us back to the narrative style of Balthazar and continues the story from where it left off. At the end of Balthazar, Darley gets a letter from Clea, which prompts him to return to Alexandria. In this war-torn city, everything has changed. Apartments have become brothels, and the characters' lives have taken different turns. Justine is in exile, Mountolive is with Pursewarden's sister, and Balthazar has become a recluse. Darley and Clea start an affair, but to the narrator, it feels more like a reshuffling. The novel seems more like a wrapping up than a standalone narrative, with the only organizing theme being boat accidents. Pombal's girlfriend is shot, and Clea is harpooned. The narrator realizes how emotionally invested they are in the characters when they read the "Clea gets harpooned" scene. In the end, Darley leaves again, Clea continues painting with her new hand, Liza and Mountolive get married, and Justine reemerges. The narrator began the Alexandria Quartet in 2008 or 2009 and has found it to be a wonderful meditation on love, relationships, fidelity, and perspective. They will likely return to Durrell's work in the future.

http://kristinsbookblog.blogspot.com/...

A fantastic finale to the quartet!

These four books are truly among the select few literary works that I would unhesitatingly describe as astonishing. Each page is filled with captivating prose, intricate plotlines, and well-developed characters that draw the reader in and keep them engaged from start to finish. The author's ability to create such a vivid and immersive world is truly remarkable. What an achievement it is to have written these four books and brought this story to life!

I have been so thoroughly impressed by this quartet that I already plan to reread them soon. I know that with each rereading, I will discover new details and nuances that I missed the first time around. These books are not just a pleasure to read; they are a work of art that will be enjoyed by generations to come.

Oh my uncle, oh Abu al-Fanous... Illuminate this darkness for me.

If there is an interpretation, of the same quality or more, for a single human act, then what does this act mean except that it is twofold? Attribution occurs in the face of the hazy background of truth, and tomorrow is only touched as a result of the deceptive nature of human division.

I was unfortunate - I say - and late in getting to know Lawrence Durrell. Sometimes on our way we come across a book or a literary work and think that we have stumbled upon a rarity or a treasure, being most impressed that it has helped us to shorten time and condense it to reach the deep layers of consciousness and the unconscious buried in the excavations of pre-history. This is what Durrell hit me with, whom I know no other author of, and it is not superfluous for me to know if he has other works or not. This much is enough for me, and if he had written nothing but the Alexandria Quartet, it would have been enough and placed him at the top of the Natharines in world literature. And despite my passionate love for the city, I did not take the work as a history of it, but rather distinguished between what I love and what is written. And yet, the city as a body did not appear much in the Quartet, but rather what appeared was the spiritual state of the city as represented in its heroes and its killers.

Can we give a definition of truth as a term and as an ideology or a creed? Can we classify the acts that we perform in the present time and judge them by absolute laws that are distributed between good and evil? Is there in our world what is called the absolute? Durrell tried to prove the absoluteness of truth, although it does not need proof. When people gather as friends, they act in the Alexandrian society with their personal history and the same events pass over them, and the Quartet creates four faces of the same event from the understanding of four people for it, where the Quartet in its four parts contains four narrators, each narrator violates what the first narrated and adds to it, undermining the bases of the truths that the first reached.

Is love what we have confessed to each other? Perhaps it comes as a result of an emotional void or an occupation of something or a bridge to reach a planned goal or excessive vanity or to create excitement from dormancy or to destroy the anxiety that sprouts its roots in our souls or to quench a thirst or to satisfy a desire or to imitate a lost other or to feel compassion or to breastfeed the ended life with the milk of youth or the confusion of personal love with the love of the city or the love of revenge for a painful past... Love in its raw meaning is only realized in the final moment of time and the occurrence of the act, and anything else is an analysis of the act and an interpretation of it and a verification of the truth of its existence from its non-existence and the excavation behind its causes and the anticipation of anxiety about what will happen to it in the future and the fear of loss and the anxiety about a certain destiny of unity.

The city is what we have clothed it with in the language that we have acquired over time and have become able to use it either in writing or orally. Throughout the Quartet, Durrell charmed me with his excellent poetic sprinkle in his portrayal of the physical nature of the city with its sharp sense and its luxurious taste and its sting behind pleasure.

Life is a game in which there is no loser or winner and there is no one who has all the knowledge or is ignorant of the absolute truth. Everyone plays in their own way in a balance that is more like a harmonious musical piece. And when the work is completed, we end up in fatigue and boredom and weariness that clothes the wrinkles and our skin is filled with our first horror of the cycle that we learned and we did not know its end or what time will draw on us. And when we see each other after a period of time, it increases or decreases: Oh my God, where have you been all this time? You have changed, as if the change occurs from one side... We remember, we remember, and we remember, and all that remains for us is memory.

I love you, yes Lawrence, you are a criminal.

To finally have finished the fourth in this amazing quartet of books feels like a journey of sorts.

It has been an absolute delight to be fully immersed in the lives of this diverse group of individuals. Thrown together by public and political life, against the backdrop of the exotic Egyptian locations and traditions, starting from the romantic 1930s and extending through the wartime. The contrast between the British characters such as Mountolive, Darley, Pursewarden, and others, with their many eccentric tales, and the Egyptian wealthy socialites, landowners, and dignitaries like Justine and Nessim, is interestingly portrayed.

This book follows the pattern of the previous three, with many passages branching off to tell the stories of each character. These stories are often not directly related to the flow of the plot but serve to fill out our knowledge of their complete selves and how they fit into the sequence of events. As we read about their progression and the intertwining of their lives, which often have tragic and unpredictable outcomes, we can view each character in a different light. Much of the book delves into the tangled sexual and artistic lives of the characters and their passionate affairs with each other.

At the close, we feel the passage of time and the impact of events on their futures and impressions of each other as they move on to the next phases of their lives. The near catastrophic climax of this fourth part unfolds in unexpected ways, marking the culmination of the narrator's (Darley) time before returning to Europe. Reading through all four books has highlighted that each individual book is just a step towards this point, another aspect of the story, sometimes told by other characters, like links in a chain.

Ploughing through it is indeed a good way to describe the reading experience as it has not been an easy read overall. The text is often very dense in parts, and I really think you would either love or hate it. However, above all, it is the writing and the way in which Durrell paints his evocative, sensual world of Alexandria in that glorious era that is the overriding joy and reward of these books. The writing is breathtaking throughout, and it has been an immensely enjoyable and challenging reading experience for me over this summer - one that I think will be hard to follow and one that I may well repeat in the future.

    Clea is the fourth and final part of Lawrence Durrell's Alexandria Quartet. It's essential to read the previous books in sequence before delving into this one. I initially considered reading them out of order but was glad I didn't. Durrell doesn't run out of material here; instead, there are many revelations and shocking turns that force a reassessment of the subjects.

    Clea herself is a beautiful blonde artist. Her entanglement with Justine added interest to Justine. Although we've met her briefly before, she has been a peripheral character until now. Even in her namesake book, she takes her time to appear on the stage.

    Balthazar also delayed his appearance, but once Clea comes into our direct gaze, she is fully present. Her opinions and desires consume both Darley's and our attention. Clea is more explicitly about the interplay between men and women than its predecessors and contains erotic passages. In focusing on Darley and Clea from a more mature perspective, Durrell does the opposite of what Pursewarden deplores.

    When Clea isn't about Darley and Clea, it's primarily about Pursewarden. His thoughts, which are likely Durrell's own, could make a whole book of aphorisms. For example, "The imperatives from which there is no escape are: Laugh till it hurts, and hurt till you laugh!" However, there are also some strange ideas, like the one about culture and sex.

    I admit that I want to read Pursewarden's idealized and cynical books even more than Darley's memoir. Darley himself admits that he would rather read Pursewarden's prose. But Darley isn't any more reliable or truthful in this novel than in Justine. He makes some ridiculous statements about women, like "the fecund passivity with which, like the moon, she borrows her second-hand light from the male sun."

    Nevertheless, there are also some true observations, such as "women instinctively like a man with plenty of female in him; there, they suspect, is the only sort of lover who can sufficiently identify himself with them to... deliver them of being just women, catalysts, strops, oil-stones." The covers of this edition aren't great. I like the font and the placement of the titles, but the images don't evoke the sense of the Quartet as a unified work or its four-dimensional aspects. If I were designing new covers, they would show the same scene through four panes of a window in Alexandria, each with a different zoom and color for each volume.

    The recurring word "irremediable" sets the tone. The events of the earlier books have receded into the past, and World War II affects the tone and view of Clea's Alexandria. The Alexandria Quartet, taken as a whole, is much more than the sum of its parts. It can be difficult to read and forgive, but it's a landmark work of 20th-century literature, and I'm glad to have read it.

The Alexandria Quartet is a "word continuum" that has consumed a significant amount of time during an intense period. It's difficult to put into words what to say at its end. Reading has been a crucial part of my life, and for many weeks, I knew that every night I would be engrossed in this utterly captivating and highly pleasurable work. I'll miss it as if it were a great friend who visited for weeks and then decided to leave. Of course, I can always ask this friend back, and sometimes I have reread a masterpiece. But now doesn't seem the right time.

The quartet centers around the scene I mentioned in my last post and increasingly focuses on the novelist Pursewarden, a minor character in Justine. The major characters from that novel, Nessim and Justine, are under house arrest on their country estate in this book. Although Darley visits Justine at the beginning and hears her explanation, she and Nessim don't play a significant role in the rest of Clea.

Darley reunites with the artist Clea, and to my surprise, they almost immediately become lovers. I had thought of Clea as almost asexual, but their love affair seems to be a function of the times. Darley has returned to Alexandria during World War Two, with a child in tow. The city is on edge, and people are living as if there's no tomorrow.
Mountolive and Liza Pursewarden also have a relationship, though it happens behind the scenes. Liza enlists Darley's help with her concerns regarding her brother's literary estate. A major portion of the novel centers around a selection from Pursewarden's notebook and a collection of letters he wrote to his sister. The emotional center of the Quartet for me ends with the burning of these letters.
My brother remarked on the strange amorality of this world, and I think it's related to the greatness of the letters and Pursewarden's way of life. I'm not sure if I agree, but it seems to be implied. I've always said that Durrell created an entrancing fictional world, but the accident that happened to Clea near the end seemed out of place to me. The other odd thing is that, at the end of Clea, everyone is suddenly leaving Alexandria. We've left some corpses in our wake, but the Quartet is verging on a happy ending. Or was Alexandria just a stage set for Durrell's most important narrative, and now he's ready to move on?

Dörtlünün en sıkıldığım kitabı Clea olabilir. Pek durgun pek heyecansizdi. Kitabın hikayesi çok yavaş ilerliyordu ve beni asla gerçekten etkileyemedi. Ancak, toplamda tabii ki İskenderiye Dörtlüsü harika bir seriydi. Diğer kitaplar çok daha heyecan verici ve ilginçtı. En çok Justine ve Mountolive'i sevdim. Justine karakteri çok karmaşıktı ve onun hikayesi beni gerçekten ilgilendirdi. Mountolive ise çok güçlü ve çekiciydi. O karakterin davranışları ve düşünceleri beni hep meraklandırdı.

An amazing book and the entire tetralogy!

It is truly a remarkable piece of work that offers a unique perspective.

The way it juxtaposes personal life with war and history is both captivating and thought-provoking.

This liberating and non-judgmental book has the power to touch the hearts and minds of readers.

It allows us to see the human experience in all its complexity, showing how individuals navigate through the chaos of war while still maintaining their own personal lives and relationships.

I truly wish more people would discover and read this wonderful book.

It has the potential to open our eyes and expand our understanding of the world around us.

Whether you are a history buff or simply someone who enjoys a good story, this tetralogy is well worth your time and attention.

Give it a chance and you will be amazed at what you find.

I have just completed this magnificent tetralogy, and I must say that I thoroughly enjoyed reading all the books in sequence. It was truly a captivating experience as we got to follow the lives of the main characters, whose stories are intricately intertwined with one another.

Now, the next step for me is to embark on reading the Avignon Quintet. I am really looking forward to delving into this new series and uncovering the adventures and dramas that await.

The Alexandria Quartet consists of four books: "White Eagles Over Serbia", "Justine", "Balthazar", and "Mountolive", each receiving a 4-star rating from me. The final book in the quartet, "Clea", was also a great read.

As for the Avignon Quintet, it includes "Monsieur", "Livia or Buried Alive", "Constance, or Solitary Practices", "Sebastian or Ruling Passions", and "Quinx or The Ripper's Tale". I can't wait to start reading these and see how they compare to the Alexandria Quartet.

To my first, belated encounter with Lawrence Durrell and his "Alexandria Quartet". I quickly devoured the subsequent volumes because Durrell masterfully weaves a story, carefully maintaining the tension necessary to hold the reader's attention.

In addition, the unforgettable characters, both the main and secondary ones, are meticulously drawn, and the breathtaking panorama of multicultural Alexandria is surprisingly multifaceted, considering the nationality and class origin of the author.

I felt this way after the first volume, but the subsequent ones showed me the true power of this novel.

Durrell, by giving voice to the different characters, develops the plotlines that were only signaled earlier and shows the previously described events from another perspective, expanding the reader's view and even赋予 the facts a different meaning. The writer challenges the reader to think about what truth is and convinces that everyone can have their own version of it.

I think that if I had reached for the "Quartet" in high school or during my studies, it would surely have become one of my favorites. Now, the theme that is the essence of this story, the driving force and motivation for almost all the characters, both annoys and amuses me. Because the "Alexandria Quartet" is a story about love, passionate, full of betrayals, lies, justifying the harming of others. Four volumes that are the apotheosis of desire, glorifying sexual drive. My life experiences suggest that people who are young or not fully emotionally mature look for love defined in this way.

Nevertheless, I recommend it to everyone, even those like me who are "jaded", looking for intellectual relaxation. Because Durrell is a fantastic "storyteller" guaranteeing great entertainment far from kitsch, and the narrative structure in the "Quartet" is a legitimate first league.