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    Justine
    Justine
    Justine
    Ebook352 pages6 hours

    Justine

    By Lawrence Durrell and Jan Morris

    4/5

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    About this ebook

    This “very remarkable novel”—first in the acclaimed Alexandria Quartet—tells a haunting story of love, desire, and deception in the Egyptian city pre-WWII (New York Herald Tribune Book Review).
      Set in Alexandria, Egypt, in the years between World Wars I and II, Justine is the first installment in the distinguished Alexandria Quartet. Here Lawrence Durrell crafts an exquisite and challenging modern novel that explores tragic love and the fluidity of recollection. Employing a fluctuating narrative and poetic prose, Durrell recounts his unnamed narrator’s all-encompassing romance with the intoxicating Justine. The result is a matchless work that confronts all we understand and believe about sexual desire, identity, place, and the certainty of time.   This ebook contains a new introduction by Jan Morris.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherOpen Road Media
    Release dateJun 12, 2012
    ISBN9781453261415
    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 Justine

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    • 3/5
      Maybe at another time in my life I would have rated this book higher than 3 stars out of five. Some of the writing is magical and evocative and the structure of the novel is rather unusual. For its time (1957) I'm sure it was daring because of the sexual frankness. Nevertheless I wasn't caught up by the story.The unnamed narrator writes about his life in Alexandria Egypt before World War II. He is English probably although that is never completely specified. He supported himself by teaching and he was trying to write in his spare time. He doesn't actually have much spare time because he hobnobs with the expat community. He has a girlfriend, Melissa, who is a dancer at a nightclub but he falls in love with Justine, the wife of a rich banker. Justine has a history of sexual affairs; her first husband wrote a book about her and her unfaithfulness. Our narrator has almost memorized the whole book. Justine's present husband suspects she is having an affair but doesn't seem to know with whom. Various other personages circle through the pages. This book is the first of four books about the same group of people so perhaps some of those people will become more important in other books. I don't think I am sufficiently interested in them to read the other books of the quartet.
    • 4/5
      These are the moments which are not calculable, and cannot be assessed in words; they live on in the solution of memory, like wonderful creatures, unique of their own kind, dredged up from the floors of some unexplored ocean.

      Full review of sorts will ensue when the tetralogy is completed.
    • 4/5
      Our reading group was quite lively discussing this, with some people hating it and some loving it. The sort of expressionist or modern style of the first two thirds, non-linear and recursive, didn't appeal to many of us, and I confess I was beginning to zone out before the linear part of the book took over. Then it was a more suspenseful tale, as the actual outcome of the shooting party was in doubt. Some of the readers loved the language, and I think if I hadn't been in a hurry to read it, and could have read a little each day, it would have been a more absorbing read for me. So it goes on the 'reread someday' list. I also felt that the rest of the quartet would flesh out the story substantially, and that we were left with only the narrator's view of a very complex society.A number of the group felt that the book was misogynistic, which is always a risk when reading authors writing in the 50s (Think Henry Miller, who was a good friend of Durrell's). I was frustrated by the view given to Justine's character as some sort of absolute seeker, instead of a women who we eventually learned was damaged in a very particular way.But the book is also about writers and writing. And when I reread it, I would like to try to focus on that, and on the character of Alexandria and the nature of the expat life in a city and country where you and your circle are outsiders even in a cosmopolitan city. Alexandria is so wonderfully described in this book, you can almost smell it and see the narrow streets and the beaches and buildings as if they were photographed for you. It's a city that doesn't exist anymore, of course, as the colonialists and expats of this era have long since been kicked out.It's good to read on Kindle, so that you can look up the more erudite language Durrell sometimes uses. I did resort to Google for translations of some of the dialog in French. Some people thought his use of language was pretentious, but I feel it reflects his academic and intellectual circle and the language they were comfortable. That he doesn't give us any quarter is beside the point.
    • 5/5
      Justine is the first novel in a four volume set known as "The Alexandria Quartet." Lawrence Durrell sets the stage with a description of the behaviors and thoughts of his characters that are determined by the cultural history and current settings of the ancient city in Egypt. The acts and interactions of the international cast, including Arabs, Jews, Africans, and Anglos, are not the results of free will, but are reactions to Justine who is affected by her life long residence in Alexandria. Justine is the flawed, sensual heart of her social group, married to and in love with Nessim but too impulsively driven to find self acceptance to remain faithful to him. Her faith is in the life of the city that she believes can reveal her identity if she can only find the key, like finding a small precise key to a beautiful and intricate pocket watch. The urgency is to find the key before her time of manic energy runs out. Durrell writes, "Somewhere in the heart of experience there is order and coherence which we might surprise if we are attentive enough, or patient enough. Will there be time?" The order and coherence of Alexandria is amoral so Justine's understanding of herself cannot be constricted by standard rules of behavior. To love Justine is to hate oneself because she embodies qualities one can never possess, just like the city that created her. For Justine self possession is finding meaning in her unconscious identification with the city, acting out in cycles of irrational sensual and destructive acts, like the repeating cycles of the history of Alexandria. I highly recommend this novel that details the futile attempt of Justine to restructure her past. She attaches to other residents of Alexandria who are seeking answers to their own mysteries in hedonism, religion, cultural identification, and mysticism. She wreaks havoc by showing them there is no apparent structure to life and love, there is no personality. There is only the temporary routine of habits of behavior and thought. The answer may be to simply surrender without qualification to the passion of the city and look for patterns of emotion.
    • 4/5
      Story is set in Alexandra, Egypt, pre world war II. The narrator is an Irish school teacher. It is a story of a love triangle, but also a story of Alexandra. The triangles are the 1) school teacher and his mistress, Melissa and Justine 2) Justine, Nessim, and the school teacher, and one could also add Melissa and Nessim bonded together against Justine and the school teacher. The story is more of character study that any plot. There is a bit of plot here and there. There is reference to an act of sexual abuse against Justine in her younger years. There is some espionage and there is the hunting scene. Mostly it is a character study with Alexandra as probably the main character. Durrell Legacy: modernistic, prewar story of love, sex. Style/structure: epiphany style of James Joyce. As the New Yorker article states; memory has free range, no formal attempt is made at structure or even at rendering the story easy to follow. It takes a great deal of work to read this relatively short work by page count. Durrell is a lyrist and each word seems to be purposely chosen, often requiring looking up (at least for me). Thank goodness for Kindle dictionary. Sex is a big part of this book yet the author does not force a lot of detail on the reader but still it is enough to before and after details and it is used as cover up for espionage, personal sacrifice, neediness, and desire for power. (Foster). There really is no healthy sexual encounters in this book. While this is a story where characters are described as Libertines and are on their own, as far as adulthood, it is also a story where the characters are coming to age. Melissa, Justine and our narrator.
    • 4/5
      Justine is far too complicated a work to review properly on a first quick reading - I want to come back to it when I've read the rest of the Quartet. First impression is that it's far too self-consciously modernist for my taste, but it might grow on me. I've never really developed a taste for Henry Miller either.Things that struck me particularly: The style seems curiously old-fashioned for a novel of the late fifties: it's very 1930s, Henry-Millerish, stream of consciousness, building up the story with a disjointed series of impressions and memories, some told in the narrator's own voice, others quoting from imagined diaries, letters or novels. Cavafy pops up all over the place, never named in the text, but obviously acting as a sort of avatar for the city, which is practically a character in its own right. Some very cleverly ironic cameo descriptions, some terribly pretentious bits, and some rather English self-mockery. Very hard to pin down.
    • 5/5
      I first read this book almost 40 years ago. It took several attempts to get into it, but I'm so glad I persevered because I then sat down and read all the books of the Quarter straight off. I was mesmerised by the mysterious, exotic, romantic, lyrical city of Alexandria and the events described in the books.Now I'm trying to recapture that excitement. I'm finding Justine quite hard work again, but I am steadily working may way through it because I know what lies ahead. Sometimes as I'm reading I think it's all just pretentious rubbish - Malcolm Bradbury's parody in The Faber Book of Parodies is excellent - but afterwards I always come back to the conviction that Justine is a truly exceptional book, something on a different level from most of the other books I have ever read.
    • 4/5
      "Justine" is the first of Durrrell's "Alexandria Quartet", four novels of which the first three are set more or less contemporaneously in Alexandria and a Greek island and the fourth of which is a sequel, all of them taking place juxt before and during World War II and with most of the same characters. Durrell's aim, realised with great success, was to show how our lack of knowledge and misunderstandings of people and situations can cause us to take actions which are partly or entirely inappropriate, and he does this in a way which a simple narrative could not have achieved. It isn't easy going, but it remains a monument to Durrell's genuine and deep feeling for the Mediterranean and its varied peoples.
    • 5/5
      Durrell's story is a fantastically compelling one told from different points of view (through the four novels in the Quartet). We get a real sense of what it must have been like to live in Egypt, and we get to meet a wonderfully complex set of characters (and see them from different angles). Love unifies/pervades these books - some of it is sensual, some of it is Platonic.
    • 3/5
      First book in 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 first volume of Durrell's Alexandria Quartet is very similar to how readers and critics describe Proust, in that the narrative chronology and tone is based on memory, and contains its qualities of nostalgic inquiry and lamentation. The memory of the narrator dwells, poetically, on the love object of Justine and on the love object of the city of Alexandria itself. The novel avoids a linear plot and the story is given through a filter of emotion rather than action. All of that happens in the narrative is covered by a sorrowful veil of reflection. This style both demands and exiles the reader's attention simultaneously, casting them into a sort of dreamy ponderance in relation to the text and its characters. That is both advantageous and slightly detrimental for the overall enjoyment of Durrell's novel. I will be curious in successive books of the Quartet to see how tone and style is altered by point of view.
    • 5/5
      For a long time, I thought I might never enjoy this novel. I've picked it up about once a decade, since the 1980's. Each time it seemed opaque, slow paced, and florid. Slowly, over the years, like a tree trunk, my taste in and capacity for literature widened. About eight years ago, I read and enjoyed Durrell's The Dark Labyrinth, and then, The Avignon Quintet. I found that research on Durrell's life, his thoughts on writing, relativity, Freud, and Gnosticism helped unlock his work. And last week, I thought I'd give the quartet one last try. Justine opened for me, at last, like a cactus flower. As lyrical, and perhaps overlauded, as Durrell's prose is, it contains numerous remarkable aphoristic insights. And just when you're about to be lulled into an opiate dream state by the lyricism, Durrell wakens the analytic part of your mind, with a stunningly apt analogy about a character or situation. In some ways, the novel, stylistically, is much like the current Netflix series, Sense8. Both are visual, sensual, and exotic. Both are slow to reveal their truths. Both scatter their focus, and yet both are periodically, and unpredictably captivating. And too, both Justine and Sense8, are shadowed by the Gnostic suggestion that things are not what they seem, and perhaps set in motion by evil.
    • 1/5
      1054 Justine, by Lawrence Durrell (read 30 May 1970) I know this guy, Durrell, writes well, but really how can I care what he writes about? I really don't. I recognize no truth in any of the supposedly profound insights he displays. The whole book just plain bored me. O, towards the end the story falls into place, etc., but I just cannot care about Justine, and Nessim and Melissa, and "I". I am not going to read the other three volumes in the quartet. Alexandria means nothing to me. [But I did read them in 2002!]
    • 5/5
      this is absolutely everything that i look for in literature. sensual without vulgarity, poetic without pretension. such a beautiful, vivid, heavy work. and i mean a work, it is art, a beautiful work of art true poetry in prose. i find that in short stories it is easier to reach this kind of potential, so to read it in a full novel is quite delightful. yet in the midst of all this, it was such an easy read but not light. highly, highly, highly recommended.
    • 5/5
      Justine is an exciting love story about the Middle East that made me think about how I see things different from other people. I read the Alexander Quartet and was shocked by each perspective and realized different people have different realities. I liked the context of the story and the drama provided but most of all, I liked the different perspectives provided. Justine is just the beginning.
    • 5/5
      Due to my anal retentiveness and insistence on finishing most everything I start, I’m sometimes not as ambitious when it comes to picking up really big books. “Justine” isn’t itself that large, but it is just the first volume in a 1,000-page tetralogy. And it’s spectacular.It reads as an odd mélange of “A Sheltering Sky” mixed with the strongly internal character development of writers like Woolf and Proust. As in “A Sheltering Sky,” the most important character isn’t a person at all, but a place. Alexandria, along with haunting presence of its patron saint and poet Constantine Cafavy, wholly perfuse the novel. The writing took me some time to get used to given its highly experimental, lyric form. At first, Durrell’s style certainly seems histrionic and overly wrought, like something embarrassing out of a soap opera. It, much like the city itself, eventually starts to grow on you. Sometime during the second half, I came to see Durrell’s prose as not lurid and purple, but almost epiphanic. There is an epigram of Freud opening the novel that says, “I am accustoming myself to the idea of regarding every sexual act as a process in which four persons are involved. We shall have a lot to discuss about that.” This, in a word, sums up much of the novel. The narrator, who remains unnamed throughout, befriends a tubercular Alexandrine prostitute named Melissa, but begins an affair with a woman named Justine, who is already married to the wealthy Coptic Christian Nessim. The attempt to hide the affair and Nessim’s growing suspicion and jealousy are what drive the novel. (It wasn’t by accident that I used the words “soap opera” above.) Durrell seems to want Alexandria to be as obscurantist and full the “Other” as possible: he puts several of the main characters in a philosophical-religious cabal, but at the end its influence and importance hasn’t been revealed.What makes this novel truly spectacular is the language, the episodic jumps in time, the lush lyricism, and how Durrell so deftly manages to tie this all into both the city of Alexandria and the themes of passion, love, and jealousy. I’ll leave you with just a few lines from the very end, just to entice: “The cicadas are throbbing in the great plains, and the summer Mediterranean lies before me in all its magnetic blueness. Somewhere out there, beyond the mauve throbbing line of the horizon lies Africa, lies Alexandria, maintaining its tenuous grasp on one’s affections through memories which are already refunding themselves slowly into forgetfulness; memory of friends, of incidents long past. The slow unreality of time begins to grip them, blurring the outlines – so that sometimes I wonder whether these pages record the actions of real human beings or whether this is not simply the story of a few inanimate objects which precipitated drama around them – I mean a black pitch, a watch-key and a couple of dispossessed wedding-rings…”
    • 4/5
      The first of Lawrence Durrell’s famous tetralogy, The Alexandria Quartet, “Justine” is a refreshingly archaic romance in the old-world meaning of the word. Compared to more modern exegesis of love, which tend to be fairly barbaric and/or saturated in ham-fisted prurience, Durrell writes in (and of) an era wherein love is synonymous with sadness; the inescapable solitude of the self underlies the emotional paradoxes of the novel. The cinematic, pre-war patina of exoticism/isolation lends the story a heavy-handed kind of charm, but the real pleasure comes in his jabs of hard truth and lyrical insight. It’s a beautiful little book.
    • 4/5
      Near the beginning of Justine, Durrell has his narrator raise a question that he must know will sooner or later occur to his readers: “I tried to tell myself how stupid all this was—a banal story of an adultery which was among the cheapest commonplaces of the city: and how it did not deserve romantic or literary trappings.” The narrator, an unnamed Irishman, a teacher and would-be writer, is in love with Melissa Artemis, a dancer previously kept by a rich furrier named Cohen, and also with Justine, the wife of the rich Nessim Hosnani, who becomes the narrator’s friend. Themes introduced early are the city of Alexandria as a causative actor, pulling the strings of the characters, and “prism-sightedness”—a multiple view of the same person or the same event from different angles, underlined by the frequent motif of multiple mirrors and by Durrell’s use of a novel and various diaries to supplement the narrator’s limited view of his experiences.The narrator shares a flat with Georges Pombal, a consulate official who occasionally provides him with a prostitute. The successful novelist Pursewarden lives down the hall, and it is in his apartment that the narrator meets Melissa, whom he nurses back to something like health before they become lovers. In the second section of the book Balthazar is introduced, a scholarly homosexual doctor who presides overthe Cabal, a meeting of enthusiasts in Hermetic literature, where Nessim, Justine, and the rich, sexually-obsessed Capodistria are all in attendance. Pombal gives the narrator a novel, Moeurs, by Jacob Arnauti, who was married to Justine when she was very young and who has written this novel about her, providing another view of Justine to complement that of the narrator and those of Nessim and Balthazar and the one she provides herself in her diaries. Yet another character is the barber Mnemjian, whom the narrator calls “the archives of the city.”Durrell introduces the dim, opportunistic character of Scobie so that the narrator can be hired by him, ludicrously, to spy on Balthazar’s Cabal. Scobie wants the narrator to break the “code” of Balthazar’s postcard messages, which are not really messages at all. Balthazar reproduces on cards to his correspondents a chessboard-like figure, with Greek letters spelling out in boustrophedon form the supposed seventy-two names of God, a key concept of the Kabbalah that Balthazar’s group studies. The point of the Cabal in the book seems to be thematic: the puzzle of Hermetic literature is a parallel for what is in Justine the oddly gnostic exercise of human love. No one in the book knows quite what to make of either, except perhaps Balthazar, who is wisely above both. He is a homosexual who forms no lasting love connections; because of his inversion, he says, he “has been spared an undue interest in love.” And he does not look for ultimate answers in Hermetic literature, either; the Cabal, he says, “posits nothing beyond a science of Right Attention.”The Mareotis, the lake that forms the southern boundary of Alexandria, is mentioned often throughout the book, and the climax comes in the annual shooting party on the Mareotis that Nessim organizes. The narrator accepts Nessim’s invitation, despite Justine’s objections. Capodistria, who is accidentally killed in the shooting, is apparently revealed as the molester of Justine when she was very young. Justine leaves Alexandria, and so does the narrator. She goes to Palestine and he to northern Egypt to teach in a Catholic school. But he returns to Alexandria when Melissa dies, and he takes the child Melissa had with Nessim to live with him as he exiles himself on an island in the Mediterranean to record these Alexandrian experiences. The book, like Justine (according to the narrator) lacks a sense of humor, aside from a few comic moments provided by Scobie. But Durrell succeeds in investing the actions of these characters, and their actions are mainly couplings, with mystery, or at least with doubt that we ever have the true or the complete story.
    • 4/5
      The New York Times Book Review says Justine "Demands comparison with the very best novels of our century." The back of my copy states, "Justine has inspired an almost religious devotion among readers and critics." If that doesn't make you want to read it, nothing I write could ever convince you to pick it up. The novel is narrated by a frustrated schoolmaster in Alexandria, Egypt before World War II begins. He wants to be a writer and he has fallen neurotically in lust with Justine- a beautiful, rich, married Jewess. The problem is almost all of the characters are neurotically obsessed with Justine in one way or another. She has a very sketchy and erotic past. Justine herself is neurotic and uses the others' obsessions to satiate her own demons, emotionally destroying those involved. The plot thickens as the narrator and Justine worry that her husband, who is also the narrator's friend, knows about their affair. The city is as mesmerizing and haunting as Justine and becomes its own character in a way. The book is beautifully written, but it is not an easy read. Passages of intellectual discussion about the nature of love, relationships, guilt, philosophy, etc. dominate. There is a book within the book, which is always a sign that the reading will not be the usual beach-reading fare. And there are frequent poetic descriptions of characters and their mental states that go on for paragraphs and sometimes for pages. For example: "Frankly Scobie looks anybody's age; older than the birth of tragedy, younger than the Athenian death. Spawned in the Ark by a chance meeting and mating of the bear and the ostrich; delivered before term by the sickening grunt of the keel on Ararat. Scobie came forth from the womb in a wheel chair with rubber tyres, dressed in a deer-stalker and a red flannel binder... like a patron saint he has left little pieces of his flesh all over the world..." Another example: “The noise of her voice is jumbled in the back of his brain like the sound-track of an earthquake run backwards.”See what I mean? Beautifully written. It's even funny, but action and pace are not first and foremost in this novel. I like stuff like this, but I think it's because I was brainwashed as an English major that I'm supposed to like it. It's difficult, intellectual, and beautiful; therefore it must be good. Is it one of the best novels of the century? No. Will I end up reading the rest of The Alexandria Quartet? Probably.
    • 5/5
      Justine is a story of adultery, of fate, of attraction. It's the story of Alexandria, Egypt as well, which the narrator blames on page one for all that follows. It's a fascinating setting brought to life with Durrell's Proustian descriptive passages - but not really so dry as that. He demonstrates the city's character through its citizens, exposing us to a wide swath of the social scale and all of their qualities. Alexandria as he portrays it is a den of self-aware licentiousness closely tied to a sense of the inevitable. This serves to feed the same beliefs in the character Justine.Justine believes she is a slave to fate, that she must inevitably act upon attraction even before it burgeons into love. It's a strange belief I can't relate to, but I found solace from confusion in the narrator - her latest lover - who doesn't really believe in it either. Nonetheless it is part of the mystery of her that attracts him in return. Both of them betray other loves in their lives, each of those relationships with its own complications. Their secret cannot be kept forever.Dialogue like music, its lyrics like poetry, whatever the subject matter. Nearly everyone in this novel is fiercely introspective, if not always correct in their analysis. The narrator is aided by a novel written by Justine's former lover that he uses as a map to navigate his own relationship with her. Perhaps here Durrell is cribbing from an earlier draft of a similar story, his own "Go Find a Watchman". The title's borrowing from Marquis de Sade does not at first seem as direct in the novel's content. The Justine of this novel acts more like her own torturer, until we learn her behaviour is likely explained by childhood abuse. Possibly it was darker abuse than we know, further shaded by fears for her lost daughter. The reader should anticipate a bolt of lightning?
    • 4/5
      I very much enjoyed the dream-like but engrossing introduction to the Alexandria Quartet. This first dip into the experiment in Point of view, did what it was supposed to do; it drew me into the other three books, and got my mind played with by Lawrence Durrell's masterpiece. The totality should never be passed up by aspiring writers, and even the casual reader should be acquainted with this lovely book.
    • 4/5
      Durrell's writing is beautiful but this book is not for everyone. It is mostly a monologue where he uses his words to create an atmosphere that is pure magic Some of his sentences will stay with you for a long time. After reading Justine, I feel a need to go on and read the rest of the quartet. His writing is very addictive.
    • 5/5
      How do you review, how do you qualify, how do you classify an experience like "Justine"? It's my introduction to Durrell as a writer, and a turning point in my adventures in literature.

      Durrell feverishly and uncompromisingly explores the inner-workings of his half-dozen lead characters, filtered through the locational limitations of their chosen city - Alexandria - and describes how each person is constantly fettered by their own past, but also their social and societal contexts, their fears and self-doubts, and their attempts at interaction. It would be easy simply to quote endless snippets of Durrell's writing here, to explain his genius. But this seems useless. Read the book yourself instead.

      It's an exhausting experience, this much is true. Emotionally, linguistically, even - in some unusual way - physically. At the same time, this snappy (200 page) book never feels dense. Despite his closely-textured style, the reader can race through this experience, never feeling daunted by the words at hand.

      Are there parts of Durrell and his style that I question? Certainly. Women, homosexuals, children, people of different colours and religions... they're all given equal weight as characters, certainly, but sometimes they're more easily defined by their different element. (Durrell's feelings on sex and love are complex, but at times it seems like he sees gay men as simply horny men who have forsaken love for the easier - but undoubtedly loveless - sexual interaction that comes with men. And his characters constantly referring to children as "it" annoys me, even though I accept it was a commonplace of the era.) One could also ask questions about his interactions with the lower classes. Durrell's Alexandria pulses with life, this is true, and his descriptive passages are viscerally evocative. However, his characters rarely engage with work or real life; they seem instead to drift through at their own pace. Perhaps this is being too specific - after all, why should the novel focus on the narrator's teaching career when it is exploring his relationship with Justine? Or perhaps it is being churlish - by the inverse token, "Les Miserables" doesn't feature many sympathetic or realistically-drawn rich people: that would be against its mandate! So, I'll let it slide.

      Durrell can be a challenging read for someone of my generation. First, much of his speech and use of words is archaic (when was the last time anyone used "terrible" to mean anything other than "of poor quality"?). Second, he had me running for the dictionary sometimes as much as four times in one sentence! (Not that I'd ever complain about learning new words or being challenged, it just unnerves me as someone who has always prided myself on my vocabulary). Thirdly, and perhaps most importantly, he comes from a very different generation and - more importantly - was writing for people like himself: upper-middle-class folk who has plenty of leisure time, who had undoubtedly travelled Europe and/or Northern Africa, who had at least a workable knowledge of three or four Romance languages, and who had a thorough knowledge of mythological, literary, and cultural references. It struck me the other day, while reading "Justine" on the train, that our society has segregated far more of late. The middle class no longer have this knowledge; it is reserved only for the few who develop a passion for it, and the few who are born to it. I almost fit that bill, so I was less challenged than many readers may be, but it's certainly clear that Durrell's target audience no longer exists, and that these books - written a scant 55 years ago - will need to be quite exhaustively annotated for future generations, if they are to remain in the public eye at all.

      "Justine" still has much to offer. Its depictions of Alexandria, oozing sweat and life and dust. The broken reminiscences of the narrator, attempting to reconcile his notions of love and sex with his experiences of same. The fascinating complexities of Nessim and Melissa, of Scobie and Clea, even of the seemingly one-note Capodistria. And, of course, the eponymous portrait. I'm assuming that that fractured portraiture is Durrell's ultimate endgame, as I will discover when I read the remainder of the Alexandria Quartet. Justine is seen refracted through so many pairs of eyes in this novel, and each heart, each mind teases out different pieces of information. None of them are wrong, per se, but none of them are absolutely right. Durrell is asking us to consider which parts of a person's dimensions are truly the essence of themselves. After all, we all wear so many masks in life that these elements threaten to overtake, and, of course, we are many different - yet truthful - things to many different people. Beyond this, we evolve and change with each experience in life. And finally, there is the fact that sometimes our minds do hold breathtaking contradictions, some that we cannot quite understand ourselves.

      For such a messy question, Durrell has found quite an elegant attempt at an answer.
    • 5/5
      Goodreads wants to know what I learned from this book? I suppose I learned that self-conscious allusions and internal textual play can go on forever, and books titled after Sade characters actually don't have a lot of sex...

    Book preview

    Justine - Lawrence Durrell

    PART I

    The sea is high again today, with a thrilling flush of wind. In the midst of winter you can feel the inventions of spring. A sky of hot nude pearl until midday, crickets in sheltered places, and now the wind unpacking the great planes, ransacking the great planes.…

    I have escaped to this island with a few books and the child — Melissa’s child. I do not know why I use the word ‘escape’. The villagers say jokingly that only a sick man would choose such a remote place to rebuild. Well, then, I have come here to heal myself, if you like to put it that way.…

    At night when the wind roars and the child sleeps quietly in its wooden cot by the echoing chimney-piece I light a lamp and walk about, thinking of my friends — of Justine and Nessim, of Melissa and Balthazar. I return link by link along the iron chains of memory to the city which we inhabited so briefly together: the city which used us as its flora — precipitated in us conflicts which were hers and which we mistook for our own: beloved Alexandria!

    I have had to come so far away from it in order to understand it all! Living on this bare promontory, snatched every night from darkness by Arcturus, far from the lime-laden dust of those summer afternoons, I see at last that none of us is properly to be judged for what happened in the past. It is the city which should be judged though we, its children, must pay the price.

    *        *        *        *       *        

    Capitally, what is this city of ours? What is resumed in the word Alexandria? In a flash my mind’s eye shows me a thousand dust-tormented streets. Flies and beggars own it today — and those who enjoy an intermediate existence between either.

    Five races, five languages, a dozen creeds: five fleets turning through their greasy reflections behind the harbour bar. But there are more than five sexes and only demotic Greek seems to distinguish among them. The sexual provender which lies to hand is staggering in its variety and profusion. You would never mistake it for a happy place. The symbolic lovers of the free Hellenic world are replaced here by something different, something subtly androgynous, inverted upon itself. The Orient cannot rejoice in the sweet anarchy of the body — for it has outstripped the body. I remember Nessim once saying — I think he was quoting — that Alexandria was the great winepress of love; those who emerged from it were the sick men, the solitaries, the prophets — I mean all who have been deeply wounded in their sex.

    *        *        *        *       *        

    Notes for landscape-tones.… Long sequences of tempera. Light filtered through the essence of lemons. An air full of brick-dust — sweet-smelling brick-dust and the odour of hot pavements slaked with water. Light damp clouds, earth-bound yet seldom bringing rain. Upon this squirt dust-red, dust-green, chalk-mauve and watered crimson-lake. In summer the sea-damp lightly varnished the air. Everything lay under a coat of gum.

    And then in autumn the dry, palpitant air, harsh with static electricity, inflaming the body through its light clothing. The flesh coming alive, trying the bars of its prison. A drunken whore walks in a dark street at night, shedding snatches of song like petals. Was it in this that Anthony heard the heart-numbing strains of the great music which persuaded him to surrender for ever to the city he loved?

    The sulking bodies of the young begin to hunt for a fellow nakedness, and in those little cafés where Balthazar went so often with the old poet of the city,* the boys stir uneasily at their backgammon under the petrol-lamps: disturbed by this dry desert wind — so unromantic, so unconfiding — stir, and turn to watch every stranger. They struggle for breath and in every summer kiss they can detect the taste of quicklime.…

    *        *        *        *       *        

    I had to come here in order completely to rebuild this city in my brain — melancholy provinces which the old man* saw as full of the ‘black ruins’ of his life. Clang of the trams shuddering in their metal veins as they pierce the iodine-coloured meidan of Mazarita. Gold, phosphorus, magnesium paper. Here we so often met. There was a little coloured stall in summer with slices of water-melon and the vivid water-ices she liked to eat. She would come a few minutes late of course — fresh perhaps from some assignation in a darkened room, from which I avert my mind; but so fresh, so young, the open petal of the mouth that fell upon mine like an unslaked summer. The man she had left might still be going over and over the memory of her; she might be as if still dusted by the pollen of his kisses. Melissa! It mattered so little somehow, feeling the lithe weight of the creature as she leaned on one’s arm smiling with the selfless candour of those who had given over with secrets. It was good to stand there, awkward and a little shy, breathing quickly because we knew what we wanted of each other. The messages passing beyond conscience, directly through the flesh-lips, eyes, water-ices, the coloured stall. To stand lightly there, our little fingers linked, drinking in the deep camphor-scented afternoon, a part of city.…

    *        *        *        *       *        

    I have been looking through my papers tonight. Some have been converted to kitchen uses, some the child has destroyed. This form of censorship pleases me for it has the indifference of the natural world to the constructions of art — an indifference I am beginning to share. After all, what is the good of a fine metaphor for Melissa when she lies buried deep as any mummy in the shallow tepid sand of the black estuary?

    But those papers I guard with care are the three volumes in which Justine kept her diary, as well as the folio which records Nessim’s madness. Nessim noticed them when I was leaving and nodded as he said:

    ‘Take these, yes, read them. There is much about us all in them. They should help you to support the idea of Justine without flinching, as I have had to do.’ This was at the Summer Palace after Melissa’s death, when he still believed Justine would return to him. I think often, and never without a certain fear, of Nessim’s love for Justine. What could be more comprehensive, more surely founded in itself? It coloured his unhappiness with a kind of ecstasy, the joyful wounds which you’d think to meet in saints and not in mere lovers. Yet one touch of humour would have saved him from such dreadful comprehensive suffering. It is easy to criticize, I know. I know.

    *        *        *        *       *        

    In the great quietness of these winter evenings there is one clock: the sea. Its dim momentum in the mind is the fugue upon which this writing is made. Empty cadences of sea-water licking its own wounds, sulking along the mouths of the delta, boiling upon those deserted beaches — empty, forever empty under the gulls: white scribble on the grey, munched by clouds. If there are ever sails here they die before the land shadows them. Wreckage washed up on the pediments of islands, the last crust, eroded by the weather, stuck in the blue maw of water … gone!

    *        *        *        *       *        

    Apart from the wrinkled old peasant who comes from the village on her mule each day to clean the house, the child and I are quite alone. It is happy and active amid unfamiliar surroundings. I have not named it yet. Of course it will be Justine — who else?

    As for me I am neither happy nor unhappy; I lie suspended like a hair or a feather in the cloudy mixtures of memory. I spoke of the uselessness of art but added nothing truthful about its consolations. The solace of such work as I do with brain and heart lies in this — that only there, in the silences of the painter or the writer can reality be reordered, reworked and made to show its significant side. Our common actions in reality are simply the sackcloth covering which hides the cloth-of-gold — the meaning of the pattern. For us artists there waits the joyous compromise through art with all that wounded or defeated us in daily life; in this way, not to evade destiny, as the ordinary people try to do, but to fulfil it in its true potential — the imagination. Otherwise why should we hurt one another? No, the remission I am seeking, and will be granted perhaps, is not one I shall ever see in the bright friendly eyes of Melissa or the sombre brow-dark gaze of Justine. We have all of us taken different paths now; but in this, the first great fragmentation of my maturity, I feel the confines of my art and my living deepened immeasurably by the memory of them. In thought I achieve them anew; as if only here — this wooden table over the sea under an olive tree, only here can I enrich them as they deserve. So that the taste of this writing should have taken something from its living subjects — their breath, skin, voices — weaving them into the supple tissues of human memory. I want them to live again to the point where pain becomes art.… Perhaps this is a useless attempt, I cannot say. But I must try.

    Today the child and I finished the hearth-stone of the house together, quietly talking as we worked. I talk to her as I would to myself if I were alone; she answers in an heroic language of her own invention. We buried the rings Cohen bought for Melissa in the ground under the hearth-stone, according to the custom of this island. This will ensure good luck to the inmates of the house.

    *        *        *        *       *        

    At the time when I met Justine I was almost a happy man. A door had suddenly opened upon an intimacy with Melissa — an intimacy not the less marvellous for being unexpected and totally undeserved. Like all egoists I cannot bear to live alone; and truly the last year of bachelorhood had sickened me — my domestic inadequacy, my hopelessness over clothes and food and money, had all reduced me to despair. I had sickened too of the cockroach-haunted rooms where I then lived, looked after by one-eyed Hamid, the Berber servant.

    Melissa had penetrated my shabby defences not by any of the qualities one might enumerate in a lover — charm, exceptional beauty, intelligence — no, but by the force of what I can only call her charity, in the Greek sense of the word. I used to see her, I remember, pale, rather on the slender side, dressed in a shabby sealskin coat, leading her small dog about the winter streets. Her blue-veined phthisic hands, etc. Her eyebrows artificially pointed upwards to enhance those fine dauntlessly candid eyes. I saw her daily for many months on end, but her sullen aniline beauty awoke no response in me. Day after day I passed her on my way to the Café Al Aktar where Balthazar waited for me in his black hat to give me ‘instruction’. I did not dream that I should ever become her lover.

    I knew that she had once been a model at the Atelier — an unenviable job — and was now a dancer; more, that she was the mistress of an elderly furrier, a gross and vulgar commercial of the city. I simply make these few notes to record a block of my life which has fallen into the sea. Melissa! Melissa!

    *        *        *        *       *        

    I am thinking back to the time when for the four of us the known world hardly existed; days became simply the spaces between dreams, spaces between the shifting floors of time, of acting, of living out the topical.… A tide of meaningless affairs nosing along the dead level of things, entering no climate, leading us nowhere, demanding of us nothing save the impossible — that we should be. Justine would say that we had been trapped in the projection of a will too powerful and too deliberate to be human — the gravitational field which Alexandria threw down about those it had chosen as its exemplars.…

    *        *        *        *       *        

    Six o’clock. The shuffling of white-robed figures from the station yards. The shops filling and emptying like lungs in the Rue des Soeurs. The pale lengthening rays of the afternoon sun smear the long curves of the Esplanade, and the dazzled pigeons, like rings of scattered paper, climb above the minarets to take the last rays of the waning light on their wings. Ringing of silver on the money-changers’ counters. The iron grille outside the bank still too hot to touch. Clip-clop of horse-drawn carriages carrying civil servants in red flowerpots towards the cafés on the sea-front. This is the hour least easy to bear, when from my balcony I catch an unexpected glimpse of her walking idly towards the town in her white sandals, still half asleep. Justine! The city unwrinkles like an old tortoise and peers about it. For a moment it relinquishes the torn rags of the flesh, while from some hidden alley by the slaughter-house, above the moans and screams of the cattle, comes the nasal chipping of a Damascus love-song; shrill quartertones, like a sinus being ground to powder.

    Now tired men throw back the shutters of their balconies and step blinking into the pale hot light — etiolated flowers of afternoons spent in anguish, tossing upon ugly beds, bandaged by dreams. I have become one of these poor clerks of the conscience, a citizen of Alexandria. She passes below my window, smiling as if at some private satisfaction, softly fanning her cheeks with the little reed fan. It is a smile which I shall probably never see again for in company she only laughs, showing those magnificent white teeth. But this sad yet quick smile is full of a quality which one does not think she owns — the power of mischief. You would have said that she was of a more tragic cast of character and lacked common humour. Only the obstinate memory of this smile is to make me doubt it in the days to come.

    *        *        *        *       *        

    I have had many such glimpses of Justine at different times, and of course I knew her well by sight long before we met: our city does not permit anonymity to any with incomes of over two hundred pounds a year. I see her sitting alone by the sea, reading a newspaper and eating an apple; or in the vestibule of the Cecil Hotel, among the dusty palms, dressed in a sheath of silver drops, holding her magnificent fur at her back as a peasant holds his coat — her long forefinger hooked through the tag. Nessim has stopped at the door of the ballroom which is flooded with light and music. He has missed her. Under the palms, in a deep alcove, sit a couple of old men playing chess. Justine has stopped to watch them. She knows nothing of the game, but the aura of stillness and concentration which brims the alcove fascinates her. She stands there between the deaf players and the world of music for a long time, as if uncertain into which to plunge. Finally Nessim comes softly to take her arm and they stand together for a while, she watching the players, he watching her. At last she goes softly, reluctantly, circumspectly into the lighted world with a little sigh.

    Then in other circumstances, less creditable no doubt to herself, or to the rest of us: how touching, how pliantly feminine this most masculine and resourceful of women could be. She could not help but remind me of that race of terrific queens which left behind them the ammoniac smell of their incestuous loves to hover like a cloud over the Alexandrian subconscious. The giant man-eating cats like Arsinoe were her true siblings. Yet behind the acts of Justine lay something else, born of a later tragic philosophy in which morals must be weighed in the balance against rogue personality. She was the victim of truly heroic doubts. Nevertheless I can still see a direct connection between the picture of Justine bending over the dirty sink with the foetus in it, and poor Sophia of Valentinus who died for a love as perfect as it was wrong-headed.

    *        *        *        *       *        

    At that epoch, Georges-Gaston Pombal, a minor consular official, shares a small flat with me in the Rue Nebi Daniel. He is a rare figure among the diplomats in that he appears to possess a vertebral column. For him the tiresome treadmill of protocol and entertainment — so like a surrealist nightmare — is full of exotic charm. He sees diplomacy through the eyes of a Douanier Rousseau. He indulges himself with it but never allows it to engulf what remains of his intellect. I suppose the secret of his success is his tremendous idleness, which almost approaches the supernatural.

    He sits at his desk in the Consulate-General covered by a perpetual confetti of pasteboard cards bearing the names of his colleagues. He is a pegamoid sloth of a man, a vast slow fellow given to prolonged afternoon siestas and Crebillon fils. His handkerchiefs smell wondrously of Eau de Portugal. His most favoured topic of conversation is women, and he must speak from experience for the succession of visitors to the little flat is endless, and rarely does one see the same face twice. ‘To a Frenchman the love here is interesting. They act before they reflect. When the time comes to doubt, to suffer remorse, it is too hot, nobody has the energy. It lacks finesse, this animalism, but it suits me. I’ve worn out my heart and head with love, and want to be left alone — above all, mon cher, from this Judeo-Coptic mania for dissection, for analysing the subject. I want to return to my farmhouse in Normandy heart-whole.’

    For long periods of the winter he is away on leave and I have the little dank flat to myself and sit up late, correcting exercise books, with only the snoring Hamid for company. In this last year I have reached a dead-end in myself. I lack the will-power to do anything with my life, to better my position by hard work, to write: even to make love. I do not know what has come over me. This is the first time I have experienced a real failure of the will to survive. Occasionally I turn over a bundle of manuscript or an old proof-copy of a novel or book of poems with disgusted inattention; with sadness, like someone studying an old passport.

    From time to time one of Georges’ numerous girls strays into my net by calling at the flat when he is not there, and the incident serves for a while to sharpen my taedium vitae. Georges is thoughtful and generous in these matters for, before going away (knowing how poor I am) he often pays one of the Syrians from Golfo’s tavern in advance, and orders her to spend an occasional night in the flat en disponibilité, as he puts it. Her duty is to cheer me up, by no means an enviable task especially as on the surface there is nothing to indicate lack of cheerfulness on my part. Small talk has become a useful form of automatism which goes on long after one has lost the need to talk; if necessary I can even make love with relief, as one does not sleep very well here: but without passion, without attention.

    Some of these encounters with poor exhausted creatures driven to extremity by physical want are interesting, even touching, but I have lost any interest in sorting my emotions so that they exist for me like dimensionless figures flashed on a screen. ‘There are only three things to be done with a woman’ said Clea once. ‘You can love her, suffer for her, or turn her into literature.’ I was experiencing a failure in all these domains of feeling.

    I record this only to show the unpromising human material upon which Melissa elected to work, to blow some breath of life into my nostrils. It could not have been easy for her to bear the double burden to her own poor circumstances and illness. To add my burdens to hers demanded real courage. Perhaps it was born of desperation, for she too had reached the dead level of things, as I myself had. We were fellow-bankrupts.

    For weeks her lover, the old furrier, followed me about the streets with a pistol sagging in the pocket of his overcoat. It was consoling to learn from one of Melissa’s friends that it was unloaded, but it was nevertheless alarming to be haunted by this old man. Mentally we must have shot each other down at every street corner of the city. I for my part could not bear to look at that heavy pock-marked face with its bestial saturnine cluster of tormented features smeared on it — could not bear to think of his gross intimacies with her: those sweaty little hands covered as thickly as a porcupine with black hair. For a long time this went on and then after some months an extraordinary feeling of intimacy seemed to grow up between us. We nodded and smiled at each other when we met. Once, encountering him at a bar, I stood for nearly an hour beside him; we were on the point of talking to each other, yet somehow neither of us had the courage to begin it. There was no common subject of conversation save Melissa. As I was leaving I caught a glimpse of him in one of the long mirrors, his head bowed as he stared into the wineglass. Something about his attitude — the clumsy air of a trained seal grappling with human emotions — struck me, and I realized for the first time that he probably loved Melissa as much as I did. I pitied his ugliness, and the blank pained incomprehension with which he faced emotions so new to him as jealousy, the deprivation of a cherished mistress.

    Afterwards when they were turning out his pockets I saw among the litter of odds and ends a small empty scent-bottle of the cheap kind that Melissa used; and I took it back to the flat where it stayed on the mantelpiece for some months before it was thrown away by Hamid in the course of a spring-clean. I never told Melissa of this; but often when I was alone at night while she was dancing, perhaps of necessity sleeping with her admirers, I studied this small bottle, sadly and passionately reflecting on this horrible old man’s love and measuring it against my own; and tasting too, vicariously, the desperation which makes one clutch at some small discarded object which is still impregnated with the betrayer’s memory.

    I found Melissa, washed up like a half-drowned bird, on the dreary littorals of Alexandria, with her sex broken.…

    *        *        *        *       *        

    Streets that run back from the docks with their tattered rotten supercargo of houses, breathing into each others’ mouths, keeling over. Shuttered balconies swarming with rats, and old women whose hair is full of the blood of ticks. Peeling walls leaning drunkenly to east and west of their true centre of gravity. The black ribbon of flies attaching itself to the lips and eyes of the children — the moist beads of summer flies everywhere; the very weight of their bodies snapping off ancient flypapers hanging in the violet doors of booths and cafés. The smell of the sweat-lathered Berberinis, like that of some decomposing stair-carpet. And then the street noises: shriek and clang of the water-bearing Saidi, dashing his metal cups together as an advertisement, the unheeded shrieks which pierce the hubbub from time to time, as of some small delicately-organized animal being disembowelled. The sores like ponds — the incubation of a human misery of such proportions that one is aghast, and all one’s feelings overflow into disgust and terror.

    I wished I could imitate the self-confident directness with which Justine threaded her way through these streets towards the café where I waited for her: El Bab. The doorway by the shattered arch where in all innocence we sat and talked; but already our conversation had become impregnated by understandings which we took for the lucky omens of friendship merely. On that dun mud floor, feeling the quickly cooling cylinder of the earth dip towards the darkness, we were possessed only by a desire to communicate ideas and experiences which overstepped the range of thought normal to conversation among ordinary people. She talked like a man and I talked to her like a man. I can only remember the pattern and weight of these conversations, not their substance. And leaning there on a forgotten elbow, drinking the cheap arak and smiling at her, I inhaled the warm summer perfume of her dress and skin — a perfume which was called, I don’t know why, famais de la vie.

    *        *        *        *       *        

    These are the moments which possess the writer, not the lover, and which live on perpetually. One can return to them time and time again in memory, or use them as a fund upon which to build the part of one’s life which is writing. One can debauch them with words, but one cannot spoil them. In this context too, I recover another such moment, lying beside a sleeping woman in a cheap room near the mosque. In that early spring dawn, with its dense dew, sketched upon the silence which engulfs a whole city before the birds awaken it, I caught the sweet voice of the blind muezzin from the mosque reciting the Ebed — a voice hanging like a hair in the palm-cooled upper airs of Alexandria. ‘I praise the perfection of God, the Forever existing’ (this repeated thrice, ever more slowly, in a high sweet register). ‘The perfection of God, the Desired, the Existing, the Single, the Supreme: the perfection of God, the One, the Sole: the perfection of Him who taketh unto himself no male or female partner, nor any like Him, nor any that is disobedient, nor any deputy, equal or offspring. His perfection be extolled.’

    The great prayer wound its way into my sleepy consciousness like a serpent, coil after shining coil of words — the voice of the muezzin sinking from register to register of gravity — until the whole morning seemed dense with its marvellous healing powers, the intimations of a grace undeserved and unexpected, impregnating that shabby room where Melissa lay, breathing as lightly as a gull, rocked upon the oceanic splendours of a language she would never know.

    *        *        *        *       *        

    Of Justine who can pretend that she did not have her stupid side? The cult of pleasure, small vanities, concern for the good opinion of her inferiors, arrogance. She could be tiresomely exigent when she chose. Yes. Yes. But all these weeds are watered by money. I will say only that in many things she thought as a man, while in her actions she enjoyed some of the free vertical independence of the masculine outlook. Our intimacy was of a strange mental order. Quite early on I discovered that she could mind-read in an unerring fashion. Ideas came to us simultaneously. I remember once being made aware that she was sharing in her mind a thought which had just presented itself to mine, namely: ‘This intimacy should go no further, for we have already exhausted all its possibilities in our respective imaginations: and what we shall end by discovering, behind the darkly woven colours of sensuality, will be a friendship so profound that we shall become bondsmen forever.’ It was, if you like, the flirtation of minds prematurely exhausted by experience which seemed so much more dangerous than a love founded in sexual attraction.

    Knowing how much she loved Nessim and loving him so much myself, I could not contemplate this thought without terror. She lay beside me, breathing lightly, and staring at the cherub-haunted ceiling with her great eyes. I said: ‘It can come to nothing, this love-affair between a poor schoolteacher and an Alexandrian society woman. How bitter it would be to have it all end in a conventional scandal which would leave us alone together and give you the task of deciding how to dispose of me.’ Justine hated to hear the truth spoken. She turned upon one elbow and lowering those magnificent troubled eyes to mine she stared at me for a long moment. ‘There is no choice in this matter’ she said in that hoarse voice I had come to love so much. ‘You talk as if there was a choice. We are not strong or evil enough to exercise choice. All this is part of an experiment arranged by something else, the city perhaps, or another part of ourselves. How do I know?’

    I remember her sitting before the multiple mirrors at the dressmaker’s, being fitted for a shark-skin costume, and saying: ‘Look! five different pictures of the same subject. Now if I wrote I would try for a multi-dimensional effect in character, a sort of prism-sightedness. Why should not people show more than one profile at a time?’

    Now she yawned and lit a cigarette; and sitting up in bed clasped her slim ankles with her hands; reciting slowly, wryly, those marvellous lines of the old Greek poet about a love-affair long since past — they are lost in English. And hearing her speak his lines, touching every syllable of the thoughtful ironic Greek with tenderness, I felt once more the strange equivocal power of the city — its flat alluvial landscape and exhausted airs — and knew her for a true child of Alexandria; which is neither Greek, Syrian nor Egyptian, but a hybrid: a joint.

    And with what feeling she reached the passage where the old man throws aside the ancient love-letter which had so moved him and exclaims: ‘I go sadly out on to the balcony; anything to change this train of thought, even if only to see some little movement in the city I love, in its streets

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