The Alexandria Quartet

Alexandria Quartet Popular literary pundits tend to present works in their preferred hierarchical order. Thus Ulysses and War and Peace on the highest levels and Tobacco Road on the lowest. Controversy usually follows, one arguing this work should be placed higher than that. As in any ordinal scale, when one goes higher, another goes lower. This baseball team standing method has no meaningful place in the assessment of literature. X is not bad because Y is better and A is not better than B, it is simply different reflecting a different domain of the human experience or psyche. Now we come to the genre of near-forgotten works that should be read and remembered. With these, a scan of the internet reviews will show that dedicated and deep readers have not forgotten them, yet the general public has no clue who or what work you mean. Lawrence Durrell seems to be one of those writers and his Alexandria Quartet seems to be one of those works. This review, among other reviews floating in cyberspace, attempts to bring him and it to the surface and to illustrate its place in the corpus of non-out-dated works. What is the Alexandria Quartet? At the first level, it is made up of four novels: Justine, Balthazar, Mountolive, and Clea. These works can be purchased as individual books, but should not be so read. They comprise in reality, Volume I, Volume II, Volume III, Volume IV of the Alexandria Quartet. From beginning to end the setting is Alexandria, Egypt. The time ranges from between the wars to during World War II. Perhaps by this point many readers will opt out having no interest in the place or time. But there is more, much more. Thoreau spoke of his simultaneous love and hate of Emerson, saying both were necessary for true friendship. Durrell carries this further, into the realm of lovers, and in my view, was onto something fundamental. I will not overinflate rhetoric here, but will say that the four volumes provide the deepest, clearest, and most wonderfully written considerations of the human phenomena of love that I think exists. Ernie Seckinger November 6, 2008