Wife of a rich Coptic businessman, Nessim. Later, at her initiative, the lover of Justine, the Jewish Great Alexandrian poet Cavafy, he becomes a friend and Love (he rescued her from a terrible party where she hadīeen given an aphrodisiac) and he has accepted her out of Melissa, who has come to him out of gratitude rather than Sensitive but often blundering and mistaken way, the He is a young man very open to experience, exploring, in a Darley, like Lawrence Lucifer, hasĭurrell's own initials (L.G.D., ' Lineaments of Gratifiedĭesire') and a personality rather like the young Durrell's. The first three volumes cover roughly the same period of time, and the same series of events, inĪlexandria in the period leading up to the Second World War, and the last volume, Clea, carries the story forward into the war years, though continuing to develop the three basic themes of art, love, and death, or perhaps art, love, and mysticism. All four were published in one volume, with numerous re-visions to iron out small inconsistencies in the text, and with a new preface, in 1962. Spiritual autobiography and as a young man's first finding of his real voice, it is on the four volumes of The Alexandria Quartet, Justine (1957), Balthazar (1958), Mountolive (1958),and Clea (1960) that Durrell's world-fame mainly rests. If The Black Book has a special interest both as a kind of The Alexandria Quartetįrom a biography of Lawrence Durrell by by G.S. The Alexandria Quartet, chapter 5 of a biography of Laurence Durell 5.
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