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The Alexandria Quartet
1096 pages
A lush, kaleidoscopic descent into the obsessive loves and shifting truths of a decadent, sun-baked city.
What it feels like
Reading this tetralogy feels like wandering through a mirage, where every truth you grasp dissolves into another perspective. The prose is famously lush and baroque, demanding to be savored slowly as it paints a decadent, sun-baked portrait of a cosmopolitan city on the brink of war. It is a deeply sensual and philosophical reading experience, circling the same events through different eyes to reveal how love, memory, and betrayal shift depending on who is telling the story. The atmosphere is intoxicating and languid, steeped in nostalgia and erotic obsession. It will thoroughly delight readers who love gorgeous, poetic sentences, unreliable narrators, and immersive, atmospheric masterpieces that prioritize emotional texture and psychological complexity over a straightforward plot.
- Mood
- decadent
- sun-baked
- languid
- intoxicating
- Tone
- sensual
- philosophical
- melancholic
- sophisticated
- Pace
- meandering
- Themes
- the relativity of truth · obsessive love · memory and perception · the spirit of place · artistic awakening
- The writing
- Lush, baroque, and highly poetic, the sentences are densely atmospheric and dripping with sensory details.
- The arc
- Moves from intoxicating, obsessive passion through disillusionment and shifting realities, arriving finally at a mature, albeit melancholic, artistic clarity.
- Who it's for
- Readers who savor gorgeous, decadent prose and are fascinated by shifting perspectives and the intoxicating atmosphere of mid-century cosmopolitan cities.
Content notes
- infidelity
- sexual content
- suicide
- political violence
- colonial attitudes
About the book
The Alexandria Quartet is a tetralogy of novels by British writer Lawrence Durrell, published between 1957 and 1960. A critical and commercial success, the first three books present three perspectives on a single set of events and characters in Alexandria, Egypt, before and during the Second World War. The fourth book is set six years later. The work was reissued in one volume in 1962, and Durrell used the occasion to make "numerous" revisions. The 1962 edition represents his final thoughts. The four novels are: Justine (1957), Balthazar (1958), Mountolive (1958), and Clea (1960).
Description from Open Library.
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