The Alexandria Quartet is a
tetralogyA tetralogy is a compound work that is made up of four distinct works, just as a trilogy is made up of three works....
of novels by
BritishThe United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland is a sovereign state located off the northwestern coast of continental Europe. It is an island country, spanning an archipelago including Great Britain, the northeastern part of Ireland, and many small islands...
writer
Lawrence DurrellLawrence George Durrell was an expatriate British novelist, poet, dramatist, and travel writer, though he resisted affiliation with Britain and preferred to be considered cosmopolitan...
, published between 1957 and 1960. A critical and commercial success, the books present four perspectives on a single set of events and characters in
AlexandriaAlexandria , with a population of 4.1 million, is the second-largest city in Egypt, and is the country's largest seaport, serving about 80% of Egypt's imports and exports...
,
EgyptEgypt , officially the Arab Republic of Egypt, is a country mainly in North Africa, with the Sinai Peninsula forming a land bridge in Western Asia...
, before and during
World War IIWorld War II, or the Second World War , was a global military conflict which involved a majority of the world's nations, including all great powers, organized into two opposing military alliances: the Allies and the Axis...
.
As Durrell explains in his preface to
Balthazar, the four novels are an exploration of relativity and the notions of continuum and subject-object relation, with modern love as the subject.
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The Alexandria Quartet is a
tetralogyA tetralogy is a compound work that is made up of four distinct works, just as a trilogy is made up of three works....
of novels by
BritishThe United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland is a sovereign state located off the northwestern coast of continental Europe. It is an island country, spanning an archipelago including Great Britain, the northeastern part of Ireland, and many small islands...
writer
Lawrence DurrellLawrence George Durrell was an expatriate British novelist, poet, dramatist, and travel writer, though he resisted affiliation with Britain and preferred to be considered cosmopolitan...
, published between 1957 and 1960. A critical and commercial success, the books present four perspectives on a single set of events and characters in
AlexandriaAlexandria , with a population of 4.1 million, is the second-largest city in Egypt, and is the country's largest seaport, serving about 80% of Egypt's imports and exports...
,
EgyptEgypt , officially the Arab Republic of Egypt, is a country mainly in North Africa, with the Sinai Peninsula forming a land bridge in Western Asia...
, before and during
World War IIWorld War II, or the Second World War , was a global military conflict which involved a majority of the world's nations, including all great powers, organized into two opposing military alliances: the Allies and the Axis...
.
As Durrell explains in his preface to
Balthazar, the four novels are an exploration of relativity and the notions of continuum and subject-object relation, with modern love as the subject. The
Quartet offers the same sequence of events to us through several points of view, allowing individual perspectives to change over time.
The four novels are:
- Justine
Justine, published in 1957, is the first volume in Lawrence Durrell's Alexandria Quartet. Justine is one of four interlocking novels which each tell various aspects of a complex story of passion and deception from various points of view...
(1957)
- Balthazar
Balthazar, published in 1958, is the second volume in the The Alexandria Quartet series by British author Lawrence Durrell. Set in Alexandria, Egypt around WWII, the four novels tell essentially the same story from different points of view and come to a conclusion in Clea...
(1958)
- Mountolive
Mountolive, published in 1958, is the third volume in the The Alexandria Quartet series by British author Lawrence Durrell. Set in Alexandria, Egypt around WWII, the four novels tell essentially the same story from different points of view and come to a conclusion in Clea. Mountolive is the only...
(1958)
- Clea
Clea, published in 1960, is the fourth volume in the The Alexandria Quartet series by British author Lawrence Durrell. Set in Alexandria, Egypt around WWII, the four novels tell essentially the same story from different points of view and come to a conclusion in Clea....
(1960)
In a 1959
Paris ReviewThe Paris Review is an English-language literary magazine based in New York City. As its name suggests it was founded in Paris in 1953, for "the good writers and good poets, the non-drumbeaters and non-axe grinders...
interview, Durrell described the ideas behind the
Quartet in terms of a convergence of Eastern and Western metaphysics, based on Einstein's overturning of the old view of the material universe, and Freud's doing the same for the concept of stable personalities, yielding a new concept of reality.
Allusions in other works
The characters and their plights in these novels are briefly referred to in a scene between Dustin Hoffman and Will Ferrell in the movie "Stranger Than Fiction" (2006). The following is written on the chalkboard behind them: "Liza's blindness, Clea's amputated hand, Leila's smallpox, Justine's stroke, Pombal's gout."
These books were also mentioned in the pilot episode of "Joan of Arcadia" which aired in 2003.
In "Slant", by science-fiction author Greg Bear (the sequel to "The Queen of Angels"), the character Alice is chosen to star in a futuristic Disney Classic filming of "The Alexandria Quartet".
Further reading
- Haag, Michael. Alexandria: City of Memory. London and New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004.