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    Balthazar
    Balthazar
    Balthazar
    Audiobook (abridged)3 hours

    Balthazar

    Written by Lawrence Durrell

    Narrated by Nigel Anthony

    4/5

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    About this audiobook

    The politics of love, the intrigues of desire … love and murder, moved obscurely in the dark corners of Alexandria’s streets and squares, brothels and drawing-rooms – moved like a great congress of eels in the slime of plot and counter-plot…’ In Balthazar, the second volume in Durrell’s Alexandria Quartet, the story and the characters come more clearly into focus. Darley, the reflective Englishman, receives from Balthazar, the pathologist, a mass of notes which attempt to explain what really happened between the tempestuous Justine, her husband Nessim, Clea the artist, Pursewarden the writer; new figures emerge and play key roles. Balthazar, in his ‘Interlinear’, explains and warns.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherNaxos Audiobooks
    Release dateMay 4, 1995
    ISBN9789629545864
    Author

    Lawrence Durrell

    Born in Jalandhar, British India, in 1912 to Indian-born British colonials, Lawrence Durrell was a critically hailed and beloved novelist, poet, humorist, and travel writer best known for the Alexandria Quartet novels, which were ranked by the Modern Library as among the greatest works of English literature in the twentieth century. A passionate and dedicated writer from an early age, Durrell’s prolific career also included the groundbreaking Avignon Quintet, whose first novel, Monsieur (1974), won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, and whose third novel, Constance (1982), was nominated for the Booker Prize. He also penned the celebrated travel memoir Bitter Lemons of Cyprus (1957), which won the Duff Cooper Prize. Durrell corresponded with author Henry Miller for forty-five years, and Miller influenced much of his early work, including a provocative and controversial novel, The Black Book (1938). Durrell died in France in 1990.  

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    Reviews for Balthazar

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    • 4/5
      With [Balthazar] Lawrence Durrell turns the entire story he told in [Justine] on its head, re-visiting the events of Darley’s life from a new point of view. Balthazar, an enigmatic and eccentric psychiatrist, is the close friend of all of the interested parties, Darley, [Justine]’s narrator; Justine, Darley’s obsession; Nessim, Justine’s husband; and Melissa, the sad prostitute with whom Darley also has an affair. Balthazar visits Darley, bringing a copy of Darley’s manuscript marked and annotated with information that was hidden from Darley. In reading Balthazar’s marginalia, Darley learns that he was completely wrong about everything that happened to him, principally about Justine’s motivations and feelings for him. In an author’s note, Durrell wrote of his purpose in writing the [Alexandria Quartet] in this way:“The characters and situations in this novel, the second of a group should be considered a sibling, not a sequel to [Justine]... Three sides of space and one of time constitute the soup-mix recipe of a continuum. The four novels follow this pattern. The three first parts, however, are to be deployed spatially...and are not linked in a serial form. They interlap, interweave, in a purely spatial relation. Time is stayed. The fourth part alone will represent time and be a true sequel...." With this new installment, everything considered settled by the first novel is in doubt as seen from Balthazar’s perspective; a new angle of view on the same story prism. The complexity infused in Durrell’s narrative makes for an even more intriguing story, and characters that sometimes seemed toneless now ring with contradiction and interest.Bottom Line: An intriguing and satisfying companion to Durrell’s earlier [Justine]; the same story as seen from a completely different angle; characters with even more flesh on their bones.4 bones!!!!

      1 person found this helpful

    • 5/5
      See the review for Justine.
    • 4/5
      Amazing subtle use of language to describe nuances of sensation, ideas and personality. An absolute triumph. Yes it moves slow as honey. Sensual violin interludes seem perfectly paired with this ancient city of mystery and melancholy.
    • 4/5
      Definitely listen to or read the unabridged version. The prose of Durrell is too exquisite to reduce to just the plot.
    • 5/5
      Balthazar is the second volume of Durrell's Alexandria Quartet. In the first book, Justine, the narrator Darley, an Irish expatriate living and teahing in Alexandria, described his fascination with the ancient Egyptian city and his immersion into the complex social life of the Alexandrians. As a writer, he wants to capture the essence of the city. The second volume is the Darley's review of an interlinear sent to him by Balthazar a psychiatrist acquaintence who presents another more informed view of the situation described in Justine. Key information not earlier available is supplied and the historical accuracy of events are supplemented by another layer of experience and interpretation. The personalities of the characters are shown to be less fixed and more determined by planned and chance events and locations than the narrator presented in volume one of the quartet. When there is limited information and insight, a point of view relies on Darley's projections of his own personality and life history necessarily limiting the understanding of a city, its citizens, and the artistic conception of the characters. Balthazar is a psychiatrist who focuses on realistic interpretations of emotions related to character interactions rather than presenting psychoanalytic jargon to obfuscate psychological history. Darley gains startling insight from the writing of Balthazar, his perspective broadens and deepens, and he adds the relativity of time as a factor in his understanding of emotions, especially love and betrayal. I thoroughly enjoyed this novel and look forward to the next layer of the story, Mountolive, the third dimension of this evolving work of art. The analysis will continue in the third volume from the point of view of Mountolive, a British Ambassador.
    • 3/5
      This is the second book in the Alexandria Quartet. The four books tell the same story from different perspectives. It is about love, relationships, and jealousy. In the first book, we focused on the unnamed narrator’s overwhelming love for Justine. In this book we find out what he believed is not true.

      We spend a lot of time with the reminiscences of the narrator, and we learn his name. We find out more about Justine and her various relationships. The major set piece of this book is an intriguing description of Carnaval. There is a murder, and a mystery, all wrapped up in a wide variety of philosophical musings.

      This is not a standalone. Justine must be read first for it to make any sense. I appreciate the creativity but it’s not going to be for everyone. The reader will need a great deal of patience with flowery language and a nonlinear storyline. As in Justine, toward the end of the book we find a thin thread of a plot, but there is nothing that feels like a conclusion. It just … ends. I liked this one more than Justine and will continue to read the quartet. I am planning to take my time, since I can only digest these books in small portions. Next up is Mountolive.
    • 4/5
      It would be unrewarding to read this book without first reading 'Justine', the preceding novel of the quartet. This second book introduces the same narrator, revisiting the ground he's already covered thanks to new information that Balthazar provides him. This time he is less caught up in his own perspective, instead exploring what these new facts suggest about what moved through others' minds. Secondary characters come to occupy the foreground, especially Pursewarden and Clea. We meet Nessim's brother and mother, and are introduced to Mountolive whom I'm trusting will figure large in the third volume. Some of the first book's events acquire a new significance, such as Justine's missing child and Pursewarden's suicide, and additional events not mentioned before are now worth Darley's relating. While Balthazar's revelations lend new shading to Darley's understanding of all that he related in the first book, they do not add a new perspective to them for the reader so much as overlay them with additional scenes, content and themes. Durrell drives deeper in the subject of love, far less focused on Justine specifically. It is almost a malevolent force in this work, so easily manipulated yet so easily manipulating, creating victims of both those who love and those who are loved. Or that might just be Darley's unacknowledged bitterness talking.
    • 4/5
      The Alexandria quartet is a wonderful short course in the ways in which a writer can play with all the conventions of the narrative art. "Balthazar" was my second encounter with the set, and really showed me that I was going to see a lot of different angles on the same set of incidents and that Durrell was a master of the tale, in the same way that Picasso was a master of the pictorial. Even on rereads, I can happily let myself be swept away by that year in Alexandria. "Balthazar' is the voice of reason applied to the devouring dream of "Justine". Yet it is not a put-down, but a revelation of the context in which Darnley and Justine played out their affair. It is essential to the whole structure of the quartet, and, the first of the three steps back one is obliged to give any pictorial masterpiece, and essential to the three steps of return to it.
    • 5/5
      I am just a refugee from the long slow toothache of English life. It is terrible to love life so much you can hardly breathe!

      A fattened, more comprehensive and weezing approach will occur when I finish the Quartet.
    • 5/5
      The abridged version of events will be difficult to understand without a summary knowledge of what happened in “Justine,” so please read my review of that novel, the “sibling companion” of “Balthazar,” for a fuller appreciation of both. This review also gives away plot spoilers for both.“Balthazar” continues the narrative started in the first volume of the Alexandria Quartet, “Justine.” This time, we read of many of the events recounted in “Justine” from another perspective, that of the psychiatrist Balthazar, who unceremoniously disrupts and complicates our understanding of the events in “Justine.” A few years after the events, the narrator, whose name we finally learn is Darley, has moved to an island with the child that Melissa has had with Nessim. Here, Balthazar drops off what he refers to as his “interlinear,” (a literary recounting of previous events from his point of view) that Darley spends much of the novel reading and meditating upon. His account completely undermines Darley’s understanding, telling him that Justine was really in love with the novelist Pursewarden, and just used him as a decoy to cheat on her husband. And we read about Scobie, a mutual friend of almost everyone in the book, including Clea, Justine, Melissa, and Darley, who is killed while in drag, possibly trying to pick up sailor for a trick.In “Balthazar,” Durrell draws the reader to the meta-fictional aspects of the story in at least two ways. His account completely reconfigures Darley’s understanding of events in the previous volume, telling him that Justine was really in love with the novelist Pursewarden, and just used him as a decoy to cheat on her husband. In this sense, Balthazar’s “interlinear” almost serves to turn the entire narrative into a series of suspect, but all equally likely, Rashomon-like perspectival takes, without any single one being allowed to be account for the entire truth. Durrell also uses Pursewarden as a kind of a novelist-cipher to shed light on the plight of the novelist – or, more broadly, the artist’s – task. This ambiguity, which can at times seem heavy-handed, seems to mirror much of what Durrell is really saying about love, and especially erotic relationships in general: that they are a series of shadows, lies, deceptions, and figments of our own fragile imaginations. As with the first volume, the language is stunning, so just as in the first review, I’d like to end with a bit of what I’m talking about – those wonderful ambiguities and mysteries which so wholly constitute Alexandria and its residents for Durrell:“I feel I want to sound a note of … affirmation – though not in the specific terms of a philosophy or religion. It should have the curvature of an embrace, the wordlessness of a lover’s code. It should convey some feeling that the world we live in is founded in something too simple to be over-described as cosmic law – but as easy to grasp as, say, an act of tenderness, simple tenderness in the primal relation between animal and plant, rain and soil, seed and trees, man and God. A relationship so delicate that it is all too easily broken by the inquiring mind and conscience in the French sense which of course has its own rights and its own field of deployment. I’d like to think of my work simply as a cradle in which philosophy could rock itself to sleep, thumb in mouth. What do you say to this? After all, this is not simply what we most need in the world, but really what describes the state of pure process in it. Keep silent awhile you feel a comprehension of this act of tenderness – not power or glory: and certainly not Mercy, that vulgarity of the Jewish mind which can only imagine man as crouching under the whip. No, for the sort of tenderness I mean is utterly merciless!” (p. 238).
    • 5/5
      again the poetry remains. what amazes me about this work is that durrell was able to continue those same themes over from justine yet still keep them vibrant and fresh. i was wondering what else could be added to justine, what other piece (let alone 250 pages of pieces) could add another dimension to such a perfect novel. all apprehensions were quickly undone as i read the first few chapters. i felt just as blown away by the revelations as the "i" was. i felt his pain in a very real way. some of the quotes in this work have been bouncing around in my brain and have worked their way out into conversation. specifically "we live by selected fictions" and "we live in the shallows of one another's personalities." these and several others like them are shaping the way i see the world. bravo!!!
    • 5/5
      Balthazar is the second volume of Durrell's Alexandria Quartet. In the first book, Justine, the narrator Darley, an Irish expatriate living and teahing in Alexandria, described his fascination with the ancient Egyptian city and his immersion into the complex social life of the Alexandrians. As a writer, he wants to capture the essence of the city. The second volume is the Darley's review of an interlinear sent to him by Balthazar a psychiatrist acquaintence who presents another more informed view of the situation described in Justine. Key information not earlier available is supplied and the historical accuracy of events are supplemented by another layer of experience and interpretation. The personalities of the characters are shown to be less fixed and more determined by planned and chance events and locations than the narrator presented in volume one of the quartet. When there is limited information and insight, a point of view relies on Darley's projections of his own personality and life history necessarily limiting the understanding of a city, its citizens, and the artistic conception of the characters. Balthazar is a psychiatrist who focuses on realistic interpretations of emotions related to character interactions rather than presenting psychoanalytic jargon to obfuscate psychological history. Darley gains startling insight from the writing of Balthazar, his perspective broadens and deepens, and he adds the relativity of time as a factor in his understanding of emotions, especially love and betrayal. I thoroughly enjoyed this novel and look forward to the next layer of the story, Mountolive, the third dimension of this evolving work of art. The analysis will continue in the third volume from the point of view of Mountolive, a British Ambassador.
    • 3/5
      Second book of the Alexandria quartet.Experimental fiction that was reportedly a commercial and critical success when first published, it has not aged well. Some of the stylistic quirks, such as heavily quoting the words of a fictional author in the story, just seem odd, while others are just self indulgent, such as the repeated returns to quote Scobie the gay former seaman and now police officer. Still the series is impressive in the capacity to represent the same events from the perspective of different story tellers at different times, and the while thing, in my view, is not great, but a good near miss. Read June - July 2010.
    • 4/5
      The second novel in Durrell's Alexandria Quartet, "Balthazar" is very much in the same vein as its predecessor, "Justine": rollicking eloquence, elusive plot, and characters viewed dimly through layers of mystery. The writing is excellent and rich with emotion. Sometimes, however, the deliberately enigmatic nature of the story results in confusion; I simply didn't always know what was going on or which characters were being discussed. For such a short novel it can be a bit of a slog, especially if impatience is even an occasional vice of the reader. Almost a year passed between my reading of these first two novels, and I suspect that my comprehension level would have been markedly better if I had picked up the second novel sooner.
    • 3/5
      The second novel of Durrell's Alexadria Quartet. Like the first book there wasn't much of a plot. What makes this readable are the superb writing and the unique time and place. Pre-WWII French/British run Alexandria Egypt. Durrell's insight's and languid writing make the book readable. Certainly not the best I've ever read but I will read the third book, Clea, one of these days.
    • 3/5
      Balthazar is the second member of the Alexandria Quartet, "not a sequel, but a sibling" to Justine, as Durrell insists. The frame story is essentially that the narrator of Justine, still sitting on his Greek island with the child, has sent his manuscript to Dr Balthazar, and Balthazar has now brought it back covered in notes and comments supplying additional information about the events described that the narrator was not aware of. We are taken through the story of Justine once again, as the narrator takes on board the additional information, which throws an entirely new light on the motivations and actions of the other characters. The technique is thus reminiscent of the "unreliable narrator" technique famously associated with The good soldier, but with the additional twist that Justine was a complete, self-contained novel in its own right: a reader who wasn't aware of the existence of the second book would have no reason to doubt the narrative authority of the first. Of course, now that we have been told that the narrator could be wrong once, we may reasonably enough wonder if we are getting the full story in Balthazar - especially since Durrell's introductory note makes it clear that we are going to get this story at least once more...Balthazar is similar in style and structure to Justine - a relatively disjointed series of scenes shifting us backwards and forwards in time; descriptions that range from delightful pin-point economy to full-scale, all-guns-blazing, thick, creamy purple soup. At its worst, it is as though Durrell had decided to write a dictionary of quotations, supplying all the material himself; at best it is wonderful.