Justine: Lawrence Durrell

Product Information

The writing is poetic and luscious and you can feel the shimmering heat of Alexandria and its scents, colours and sounds. The city is almost another character; a city of dreams and lost horizons. The whole thing is magical, erotic, steeped in Freud. The poetry of Cavafy at the end is especially apt. Morrison, Ray. A Smile in His Mind's Eye: A Study of the Early Works of Lawrence Durrell. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 2005. a lecture on poetry and is about to go home to his mistress, a sad Greek dancing girl named Melissa, when he is sought out by the book's heroine, Justine, a beautiful Jewess married to Nessim, a sensitive Coptic millionaire. Lampert, Gunther. Symbolik Und Leitmotivik in Lawrence Durrells Alexandria Quartet. Bamberg: Rodenbusch, 1974.

Pelletier, Jacques. Le Quatour D'Alexandrie De Lawrence Durrell. Lawrence Durrell's Alexandria Quartet. Paris: Hachette, 1975. On the other hand, something unexplained or unexplainable in the narrator seems to resist the pull of love. Perhaps he fears the immersion in something other, whether or not it is of his own creation, whether or not it is a sole or joint creation. Perhaps he wishes to remain disintegrated in the expectation that he cannot be disintegrated any further, at which point he would have nothing to lose.Durrell's father died of a brain haemorrhage in 1928, at the age of 43. His mother brought the family to England, and in 1932, she, Durrell, and his younger siblings settled in Bournemouth. There, he and his younger brother Gerald became friends with Alan G. Thomas, who had a bookstore and would become an antiquarian. [4] Durrell had a short spell working for an estate agent in Leytonstone (East London). [5] Adult life and prose writings [ edit ] First marriage and Durrell's move to Corfu [ edit ] My landlord told me the French consul longed to replace me as Justine's lover and tormented me with the story of her first marriage to Arnaute, a French Albanian. How she longed to be beaten for the remission of her adulterous sins. "Engorge-moi in a syllogistic love," she would implore him. Can real people only exist in the imagination of great artists? Non. Zahlan, Anne R. "City as Carnival: Narrative as Palimpsest: Lawrence Durrell's The Alexandria Quartet." The Journal of Narrative Technique 18 (1988): 34–46. Sajavaara, Kari. Imagery in Lawrence Durrell's Prose. Mémoires De La Société Néophilologique De Helsinki 35. Helsinki: Société Néophilologique, 1975.

Cornu, Marie-Renée. La Dynamique Du Quatuor D'Alexandrie De Lawrence Durrell: Trois Études. Montréal: Didier, 1979. One can return to them time and time again in memory, or [use] them as a fund upon which to build the part of one's life which is writing." For all the abstraction, there is still something tangible and tactile, touching and exciting in their relationship: The function or destiny of an artist's creativity, according to Durrell, is not to be wounded or defeated by everyday reality, but to complete, perfect or fulfil the potential of the experience in our imagination. He refers to the relation of experience and imagination as a "joyous compromise". I fail to believe that Lawrence Durrell delivers a balanced view of Alexandria, the city itself, in the 1930s. It is one-sided.

I know that for us love-making was only a small part of the total picture projected by a mental intimacy which proliferated and ramified daily around us." Durrell supported his writing by working for many years in the Foreign Service of the British government. His sojourns in various places during and after World War II (such as his time in Alexandria, Egypt) inspired much of his work. He married four times, and had a daughter with each of his first two wives. It's because the imagination fulfils their potential, that the moments live on in perpetuity. An artist creates something separate from experience that survives the present.

Dearborn, Mary V. (1992). The Happiest Man Alive: A Biography of Henry Miller. Touchstone Books. ISBN 0-671-77982-6. p. 192 and picture insert captions. Zahlan, Anne R. "Always Friday the Thirteenth: The Knights Templar and the Instability of History in Durrell's The Avignon Quintet." Deus Loci: The Lawrence Durrell Journal NS11 (2008–09): 23–39. At the outset, the un-named narrator is a relatively uncommitted, listless and unambitious teacher, trapped in routine, at least until he receives an introduction into the more cosmopolitan and sophisticated elements of Alexandrian life. Durrell to Henry Miller: "Gypsy Cohen provides a cyclone every day with a real generous and mad beauty which is touching and exciting." I had lost the will to live, gazing in a desultory, yet artistically languid, manner into my vacant subconscious and whiling away the taedium vitae with stray girls. This was the unpromising material on which Melissa poured her shimmering nectar. For a week, her former lover, a bestial furrier, stalked the streets, intending to shoot me. But this was Alexandria, where everything was over-analysed under the sun's burning zenith and nothing really happened. Unfortunately.Sertoli, Giuseppe. Lawrence Durrell. Civilta Letteraria Del Novecento: Sezione Inglese—Americana 6. Milano: Mursia, 1967. Gifford, James. Personal Modernisms: Anarchist Networks and the Later Avant-Gardes . EdmontonL U Alberta P, 2014. Cohen, Roger (14 August 1991). "A Daughter's Intimations". The New York Times . Retrieved 11 May 2016. Prospero's Cell: A guide to the landscape and manners of the island of Corcyra [Corfu] (1945; republished 2000) ( ISBN 0-571-20165-2) The word "rebirth" is in the air. It is the main idea behind another important British novelist, C.P. Snow. But there is a world of difference between the two. Snow is responding from a sense of public responsibility; Durrell is testifying shyly

Literary Lifelines: The Richard Aldington—Lawrence Durrell Correspondence (1981) edited by Ian S. MacNiven and Harry T. MooreJustine is married to Nessim, but Justine and the narrator are deeply in love. Nessim seems to know, but chooses and or pretends, for as long as he can justify it, not to know. The narrator feels terrible about the situation, is worried of what Nessim will do, but too much in love to break it off. Justine at least appears to not care at all. The scene for the story Durrell's narrator tells is the dusty, modern Alexandria of the 1930s, "an exotic city of constant interactions between cultures and religions", [1] and with a cultural milieu that mixes exceptional sophistication with equally remarkable sordidness. [2] Justine is portrayed by Durrell in a manner which 'mirrors' Alexandria in all of its complexities, with its mixture of elegance and extreme poverty, and its ancient Arab ways co-mingled with modern European mores. [1] Durrell's Alexandria is a city where Europeans exist alongside Egyptians, and Jews and Christians exist alongside Muslims, and his characters, especially his lovely protagonist, she of the "sombre brow-dark gaze," mirror the city. For Durrell, his protagonist Justine is the essence of Alexandria, its "true child…neither Greek, Syrian, nor Egyptian, but a hybrid." [1] Something had been building i