Justine
“The sea is high again today, with a thrilling flush of wind.”
This is a reread of the first book in Lawrence Durrell’s Alexandria Quartet. I read these a few years ago, and well, I suppose I am reading them again. The books are odd in the sense that while they are companion pieces to one another, they are neither exactly sequels nor comprise a series. Instead, they are like different paintings, ostensibly portraying the same scene, but with different light and a slightly different perspective, each challenging and adding to the other. They also don’t fully come into complete picture until they’re all completed.
What fascinates me here at the beginning again is how much of this story, such as there is one, feel familiar enough. The novel wants to paint a picture of Alexandria (as in the city in Egypt) as mysterious and exotic, which is true, if you’re not from there and not a native Arabic speaker. But you get glimpses of the Alexandria that is familiar and home from the very few moments in which our Irish narrator and his mostly UK friends and compatriots are interacting with Egyptians in non-servile roles. But then again, our most prominent Egyptian character, Nessim, is the figure from whom our narrator takes the most from, in the form an affair he has with Nessim’s wife, the Justine of the title of the book.
The book functions a lot like memory. What this looks like in practice is someone who begins telling you of a time, a place, and a set of people, but because he knows everything that lives in his memory, he struggles to place in front of him for the reader to understand until enough of the pieces fall into place and enough of the context and the threads are recognizable enough see broader patterns emerge. It can be a very frustrating experience. What I was most reminded of this time is how much of this city (although not THIS city) and time actually do feel familiar to me when I think back on the various Naguib Mahfouz novels I’ve read since my first reading here, but specifically, Adrift on the Nile.
Balthazar
This second novel in many ways retells the same story of the first, at least at the beginning. What’s really fascinating about how it functions here is that we have the same narrator at first who finds documents and texts from the character Balthazar, another of the primary figures from the first novel, and presents them to us, but doesn’t just plot them in the way a contemporary novel might, but instead tries to figure out through his role as narrator how to bring them forth. This makes it more like Absalom! Absalom! than something more contemporary.
The novel then goes into a few different sections: in one we get the death of Scobie, a Queer man who sees his Queerness as a kind of disease or addiction who dies in a hate crime near the wharf, and also the character Pursewarden, a character based on the now oft-forgotten novelist Wyndham Lewis.
The novel ends with a section that I found somewhat like Molly Bloom’s monologue at the end of Ulysses, where Clea, the subject of much thought in the book, and the title character from the fourth book in the series gets her say of things. Books that retell the same story from before tend to be more presentable forward than we have it here, but this one really tries to figure out how we actually sort through new, conflicting information. We don’t simply replace it.