Reviews for Justine

The average rating for Justine based on 2 reviews is 4 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2014-09-10 00:00:00 Damon Anthony “In the great quietness of these winter evenings there is one clock: the sea. It’s dim momentum in the mind is the fugue upon which this writing is made. Empty cadences of sea-water licking it’s own wounds,sulking along the mouths of the delta, boiling upon those deserted beaches– empty under the gulls: white scribble on the grey, munched by clouds." - Lawrence Durrell, Justine Sometimes you discover a new author and know you’re going to be friends for life. A one-sided friendship but you know you’ll be better off for it. I just finished one of the most beautiful books I’ve ever read. I have never read such exquisite descriptions in my life. This is a story focusing on the intertwining lives of the unnamed Irish narrator; Melissa, his girlfriend; Justine, the woman everyone is infatuated with; and her husband, Nessim, living in Egypt just before the break of the First World War. You expect there to be affairs, and there are, but the pull of the story to me is more than the scandal, it’s primarily the writing itself. “Capitally, what is this city of ours? What is resumed in the word Alexandria?” To me , someone who has never been to Egypt, Alexandria is a place where the biggest library in the world once stood, the loss of which was a tragedy to all bibliophiles. To Durrell it was a racially diverse city with its many religions and culture co-existing in one region, a place for academics and writers. Alexandria is also an important character in this book, as mysterious with its diversity as is Justine, the titular character. This is my ideal book; an interesting story in a fascinating locale, plenty of philosophy and poetic prose. The words Durrell used were like poetry and left me stunned. His characters are so well-developed, which maybe makes this one stand out to me a bit more than those in Anais Nin books (I do find their styles similar and I can see why Nin admired him so much). The characters seemed so real to me, one of the most interesting being Scobie: “Scobie is a sort of protozoic profile in fog and rain for he carries with him a sort of English weather, and he is never happier than when he can sit over a microscopic wood-fire in winter and talk…Whenever he speaks of the past it is in series of short dim telegrams– as if already communications were poor, the weather inimical to transmission.” The fact that there are three more books in the Alexandria Quartet fills me with such excitement. I have a new favourite writer:)

Review # 2 was written on 2020-06-24 00:00:00 Josh Brunsell The opening novel of Durrell’s Alexandria Quartet didn’t leave me indifferent. It’s probably one of the best well written books I have ever read. Durrell’s mastery of the word is indisputable. Surreal descriptions of place, evocative and provocative, tinged with poetic melancholy. “The ripple and flurry of the invisible colonies of birds around us increases. Slowly, painfully, like a half-open door the dawn is upon us, forcing back the darkness.” This delicious quote is part of quite a long scene at the end of the novel, just before the unnamed narrator goes back to his dear Alexandria to visit the child of his deceased lover. One can’t help but notice the polished use of language as well as the tension building up towards an end that leaves the reader with a feeling of emptiness, the kind that is forged in disappointment and sadness. And this is mainly what I found marvelous about this novel. The atmospheric use of color and mood, the powerful sense of place, of the city that is the true protagonist of this story: The city that merged “five races, five languages, a dozen creeds: five fleets turning through their greasy reflections behind the harbor bar” . The 1930s city of Alexandria. The rest sounded shallow to this reader's ears. The melodramatic characters. The crisscrossed, doomed love affairs. The psychoanalytical and rather useless chatter of the narrator. Everything but the city was depicted with any substantial depth, everything paled in comparison to the great detail with which magnificent Alexandria was brought to life. Durrell’s attempt at psychology, which is written with finesse both in sound and rhythm, so very pleasant to read, can’t beat the underlying grandiloquence of his sentences that bear latent misogynistic vibes, such as attributing abuse as the reason for the femme fatale's promiscuity. "Justine" gives the title to this novel and yet she ends up being a mere sketch, a tenuous presence that comes in and out of the main stage where the nameless narrator builds his case. A brilliant novel that failed to move me as I expected it would. As I turned the last page, I felt sad to see the exquisiteness of Durrell’s prose go, knowing at the same time that I would forget Justine’s tribulations in no time at all. Funnily enough, “Gazelle”, Ducornet’s lesser known heroine still haunts my dreams from time to time.