You might have guessed it was Justine I once loved," Clea later wrote to me. "She has extinguished her sexuality and is working on a kibbutz. Melissa has died of cancer, having given birth to Nessim's star-crossed child. Can we be friends?"

Born in India to British colonial parents, he was sent to England at the age of eleven for his education. He did not like formal education, but started writing poetry at age 15. His first book was published in 1935, when he was 23. In March 1935 he and his mother and younger siblings moved to the island of Corfu. Durrell spent many years thereafter living around the world. In 1955 Durrell separated from Eve Cohen. He married again in 1961, to Claude-Marie Vincendon, whom he met on Cyprus. She was a Jewish woman born in Alexandria. Durrell was devastated when Claude-Marie died of cancer in 1967. He married for the fourth and last time in 1973, to Ghislaine de Boysson, a French woman. They divorced in 1979. The story circulates around four people during the period leading up to World War II. The story is set in Alexandria, Egypt. The city is a major part of the story with the narrator claiming that the city and its ways have a hold on the inhabitants and forever mark them. The four people are the narrator - who is never called by name - his girlfriend Melissa, the woman with whom he has an affair Justine, and Justine's husband Nessim. As the story opens, the narrator tells of his life at the end of the story in which he lives quietly, raising Melissa's child and doing little else. He then changes the setting to his life in Alexandria. I had lost the will to live, gazing in a desultory, yet artistically languid, manner into my vacant subconscious and whiling away the taedium vitae with stray girls. This was the unpromising material on which Melissa poured her shimmering nectar. For a week, her former lover, a bestial furrier, stalked the streets, intending to shoot me. But this was Alexandria, where everything was over-analysed under the sun's burning zenith and nothing really happened. Unfortunately. I know that for us love-making was only a small part of the total picture projected by a mental intimacy which proliferated and ramified daily around us."Other works from this period are Sicilian Carousel, a non-fiction celebration of that island, The Greek Islands, and Caesar's Vast Ghost, which is set in and chiefly about the region of Provence, France. Well, that question is extremely hard to answer. I think it's about nothing. Ostensibly it's about modern love and what love and sex signify in modern times, but again - it's mostly a bunch of meaningless drivel. I guess, loosely, you could say it is about a love square between four people living in Alexandria right before WWII. Alexandria is a wretched hive of scum and villainy, filled with prostitutes, child prostitutes, orgies, drugs, and every brand of excess imaginable. All enjoyed as if it were just completely okay to do things like have orgies with 10-year-old girls and stuff. It's because the imagination fulfils their potential, that the moments live on in perpetuity. An artist creates something separate from experience that survives the present. Increasingly we believe the world needs more meaningful, real-life connections between curious travellers keen to explore the world in a more responsible way. That is why we have intensively curated a collection of premium small-group trips as an invitation to meet and connect with new, like-minded people for once-in-a-lifetime experiences in three categories: Culture Trips, Rail Trips and Private Trips. Our Trips are suitable for both solo travelers, couples and friends who want to explore the world together.

I recall the furtive languor with which we dressed and silent as accomplices made our way down the gloomy staircase into the street. We did not dare to link arms, but our hands kept meeting involuntarily as we walked, as if they had not shaken off the spell of the afternoon and could not bear to be separated. We parted speechlessly too...with only one look - as if we wished to take up emplacements in each other's mind forever." The biggest problem, however, is the theme of the book itself. Or perhaps not the theme, but the recurring elements. In brief, our protagonist cheats on his girlfriend Melissa with Justine, who is in turn cheating on her husband Nessim. So far, so standard. The difficulty comes when our unnamed protagonist and Justine spend much of their time lamenting their infidelity, but unable to help themselves. Durrell is clearly trying to make some philosophical statements about love and life, but I simply felt that the narrator and Justine were fairly shallow people that I would not much like.I know this book is a classic - but it's also a slog and a mess. Not to mention an intellectual narcissistic masturbatory exercise. Really. You could easily cut out at least 50% of the book. I was rolling my eyes and begging Durrell to shut up about 70% of the time.

Bernstein, Matthew (2000) [1994]. Walter Wanger, Hollywood Independent. University of Minnesota Press. p.355. ISBN 0-8166-3548-X. Andrewski, Gene; Mitchell, Julian (23 April 1959). "Lawrence Durrell: The Art of Fiction No. 23 (interview)". The Paris Review . Retrieved 1 July 2006. I return link by link along the iron chains of memory to the city which we used to inhabit together: the city which... precipitated in us conflicts which were hers and which we mistook for our own: Alexandria...It is the city which should be judged, though we, its children, must pay the price." Zahlan, Anne R. "The Most Offending Souls Alive: Ruskin, Mountolive, and the Myth of Empire." Deus Loci: The Lawrence Durrell Journal NS10 (2006).

Each character is a facet of the Alexandrian world. Equally, each discrete section of text displays a separate facet of one of the characters. Alexandre-Garner, Corinne. Le Quatuor D'Alexandrie, Fragmentation Et Écriture: Étude Sur Lámour, La Femme Et L'Écriture Dans Le Roman De Lawrence Durrell. Anglo-Saxon Language and Literature 136. New York: Peter Lang, 1985. During World War Two, Durrell served as a press attaché to the British embassies, first in Cairo and then Alexandria. While in Alexandria he met Eve (Yvette) Cohen (1918–2004), a Jewish Alexandrian. She inspired his character Justine in The Alexandria Quartet. In 1947, after his divorce from Nancy was completed, Durrell married Eve Cohen, with whom he had been living since 1942. [14] The couple's daughter, Sappho Jane, was born in Oxfordshire in 1951, [15] and named after the ancient Greek poet Sappho. [16] Todd, Daniel Ray. An Annotated, Enumerative Bibliography of the Criticism of Lawrence Durrell's Alexandria Quartet and his Travel Works. New Orleans: Tulane U, 1984. [Doctoral dissertation]

On 22 January 1935, Durrell married art student Nancy Isobel Myers (1912–1983), with whom he briefly ran a photographic studio in London. [6] It was the first of his four marriages. [7] Durrell was always unhappy in England, and in March of that year he persuaded his new wife, and his mother and younger siblings, to move to the Greek island of Corfu. There they could live more economically and escape both the English weather, and what Durrell considered the stultifying English culture, which he described as "the English death". [8]

If that sounds over-blown, well, the Quartet itself is not without pretension, in concept as in performance. As has generally been admitted, it is often ornate and over-written, sometimes to an almost comical degree. The high ambition of its schema can make its narratives and characters inexplicably confusing, and its virtuoso use of vocabulary can be trying ("pudicity"? "noetic"? "fatidic"? "scry"?). But if there are parts of the work that few readers, I suspect, will navigate without skipping, there are many passages of such grand inspiration that reaching them feels like emerging from choppy seas into marvellously clear blue Mediterranean waters. Your wife is no longer faithful to you," Melissa blurted out one evening to Nessim. His madness was the Devastatio described by Swedenborg and yet he felt her kinship as they ran naked into the sea together. It was as if the four of us were conjugal complementarities. Capodistria has been shot," a beater cried. There was no doubt Nessim had shot him, blaming the Cabal for taking his wife away from him, though we never spoke of this. Justine disappeared that day and neither of us ever saw her again. Hodgkin, Joanna (2013). Amateurs in Eden: the story of a bohemian marriage; Nancy and Lawrence Durrell. London: Virago. ISBN 9781844087945.