BASC50036 - Lawrence Durrell, "The Alexandria Quartet: Mountolive and Clea"

Course Description

Lawrence Durrell’s Alexandria Quartet – Justine, Balthazar, Mountolive and Clea – generates truly absorbing, soul-arresting, deeply-interconnected characters, of widely-differing backgrounds and natures. They are embroiled in the pulsing life of themselves, and of gritty - and mythic - Alexandria, Egypt, before and during World War II, and in resumed interconnection six years later. Limning the lives and events of desert aristocrats and paradoxes Nessim and Narouz, their mother Leila, the knower Dr. Balthazar, British diplomat Mountolive, splendid Justine – who enmeshes many, writer Darley – insider and not, the rascally, poignant, hilarious old policeman Scobie, the beautiful, contemplative artist Clea, in each book, Durrell paints portraits that are totally persuasive – to us readers, and, at least temporarily, to the characters within them. And then guts and inverts them. Durrell’s storytelling style is naturalistic and delicious; he is also exploring space, time, change, continuity, identity, memory, questions of The Real – as really as do Einstein, Freud, Joyce, Bergson, Cavafy, Kurosawa’s Rashomon, Picasso’s fracturing Cubism, Monet’s several Wheatstacks or Rouen Cathedral facades.

These four works, published individually between 1957 – 1960, seize one. Our reading and discussion will be rich. In Winter Quarter (Session One), we embrace Justine and Balthazar. In Spring’s Session Two, Mountolive and Clea.

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