![]() ![]() ![]() If that sounds over-blown, well, the Quartet itself is not without pretension, in concept as in performance. It is a device, Durrell claimed, amounting to a new concept of reality, reflecting the ideas of Freud and Einstein and a convergence of western and eastern metaphysics. The four volumes concern the same characters, but each of the several narrators tell the novels' complex tales from their own viewpoint, and they write at different times. It was based on the premise that people and events seem different when considered from different angles and periods, and that they can best be recorded, as Durrell himself put it, stereoscopically. It was an experimental novel of its day, perhaps related to the work of Durrell's friend Henry Miller, perhaps to Ulysses. It is actually neither specific nor precise about anything. ![]() The work itself is greater than its themes, and casts a spell that is neither precisely emotional nor specifically topographic. Almost infinite variations of love are certainly explored in its 1,000-odd pages, and the presence of Alexandria certainly permeates the work, but I think the legendary fascination of the quartet is essentially existential. ![]() T he Alexandria Quartet, Lawrence Durrell's celebrated tetralogy from the 1950s, was defined by its author as "an investigation of modern love", but has often been regarded by its readers more as an evocation of a city – the Greco-Arab, multi-ethnic Alexandria of its title. ![]()
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