#70....The Alexandria Quartet....Mountolive

"He pondered deeply upon them during those long sleepless days and nights and for the first time he saw them, in the light of this new knowledge, as enigmas. They were puzzles now, and even their private moral relationship haunted him with a sense of something he had never properly understood, never clearly evaluated. Somehow his friendship for them had prevented him from thinking of them as people who might, like himself, be living on several different levels at once. As conspirators, as lovers--what was the key to the enigma? He could not guess."

In Mountolive, Lawrence Durrell's third installment of the dramatic Alexandria Quartet, Durrell takes a different turn from his previous novels Justine and Balthazar. We finally leave behind the whiny, depressed narrator Darley, and switch to an omniscent third person narrator who gives us the skinny on what's REALLY going on behind the scenes. Mountolive might well be called "Nessim", because a good portion of the novel takes place from Nessim's POV...and boy, is he not who you think he is.

David Mountolive, a Britisher who is briefly mentioned during Balthazar, meets up with the same wacky cast of characters from Justine when he spends time at the Hosnani household perfecting his Arabic. He develops a close friendship with Nessim (pre-Justine) and an even closer friendship (with benefits) with Nessim's mom Leila, who is tending her sick husband. We also get to know Nessim's younger, less attractive brother Narouz, who is a couple cards short of a deck, if you know what I mean. Mountolive returns to England, and after years in the diplomatic service is finally given an Ambassadorship back to Egypt. He hopes to hook up again with Leila, whom he has been corresponding with by letter since he left, and whose husband has finally died, but Leila becomes disfigured after a bout with smallpox and is afraid to meet him.

Through diplomatic channels, and thanks to one of Pursewarden's one-night-stands, Mountolive and we find out what Nessim's really been up to all this time. Apparently he's been shipping weapons illegally to Palestine in support of the Jewish cause. Which, if you've been keeping up, explains why he was so hot to marry Justine (she of the Jewish faith). We discover that Justine was sleeping with both Pursewarden and Darley to keep an eye on them in case they knew anything about Nessim, since Pursewarden is in the diplomatic corps and Darley is close to Melissa, who was dating someone who knew all about Nessim. When Pursewarden discovers the truth, he kills himself rather than turn in his friend, but tells Mountolive what he knows before he offs himself. Mountolive has to turn this information over to the British, and starts to see his friend in a whole new light. The Minister of the Interior, Memlik Pasha, is kept quiet by Nessim through bribery, and they both agree that no one need know which Hosnani brother was responsible for the diplomatic melee. So you guessed it...Narouz gets the blame and the gunfire.

There were good and bad things for me about Mountolive. Parts of it bored me to tears. It was way more historical and political than Justine or Balthazar, which were more gossipy and, at times, mopey and sentimental. The best part of the book, for me, happened once everyone started to figure out what Nessim was up to. I could not stop reading. There were a lot of "a-ha" moments....scenes from the first two books suddenly made sense. It made me want to go back and re-read the first two books again so I could put things together, or in case I missed stuff.

I have read that the next book, Clea is actually a sequel, not another POV on the same time period like the first three books, so I will be excited to finally move forward in time and see what happens to everyone.

Grade: B+

July '10's Literary Dirtbag

This month's MLLD award goes to the adorable Emily Bas-Thornton, loving big sister and cold blooded murderer, from Richard Hughes' A High Wind in Jamaica. After murdering a Dutch sea captain on board a pirate ship, she sends five innocent pirates to their deaths when she doesn't tell the truth about the murder on the witness stand at their trial. And shows absolutely no remorse for any of it. Emily should be grounded for LIFE.

Welcome All Hoppers!

For those of you stopping by from the Crazy For Books blog hop, welcome! We're about 1/3 of the way through the Modern Library's 100 Best Books from the last century. To get you up to speed on what we're all about, the book reviews for books 100-70 are on the bottom left. We read 'em, review 'em, and move on, and we're not stopping til we get to #1!

This week's Blogtastic question from Crazy For Books is, who is your new favorite author? I have to say that since I began the Modern Library's list, I have really begun to like V.S. Naipaul, who happily has written about a zillion other books besides the ones I have already read. I can't wait to get the ML list done so I can check out the rest of his work. His books always take place in really cool places I would be too chicken to get on a plane and visit...but luckily they are so descriptive it feels like you're there!

Thanks for stopping by!

Libris Interruptus....Books as Inspiration

Books not only entertain us, but sometimes can inspire us to try something we never would have before, or learn something new. What is the craziest/most interesting thing a book has ever inspired you to do, and which book was it? I can't wait to hear your answers!!!

#70....The Alexandria Quartet....Balthazar

"'We live', writes Pursewarden somewhere, 'lives based on selected fictions. Our view of reality is conditioned by our position in space and time--not by our personalities as we like to think. Thus every interpretation of reality is based upon a unique position. Two paces east or west and the whole picture is changed.'"

Just when you thought you got the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth about Justine and her wacky crew of friends and ex-lovers in Justine, Durrell turns everything upside down in Balthazar, the second installment of his Alexandria Quartet. Just to see if you were paying attention.

Our depressed hermit friend Darley sends his copy of his memoirs of his days in Alexandria and his love affair with Justine (basically the manuscript of Justine) to his buddy Balthazar back in Alexandria. Balthazar shows up on the island not only with the manuscript full of commentary, but corrections. Apparently, boy did Darley have a whole bunch of things wrong. "A diary is the last place to go if you wish to seek the truth about a person. Nobody dares to make the final confession to themselves on paper: or at least, not about love," Balthazar states. So everything Darley wrote about his memories of Justine are either wrong, skewed, or incomplete. By the end of Balthazar, even Darley is doubting his reliability as a narrator. And so was I, big time.

The magic of Balthazar is that Durrell makes discovering these inconsistencies and gaps in Darley's story interesting. It's like seeing a house painted a cool color, and then finding out the owners had to mix four different paints to get it. It adds dimension and layers to the essentially one-sided story we're presented with in Justine. We learn, for example, that the secret agent Scobie is a cross dresser. We learn about Nessim's reclusive family, and how Nessim got Justine to agree to marry him in the first place. We learn why Justine ever got started with Darley in the first place....and boy, does THAT revelation hit Darley hard.

There are always two sides to every story...all of us know that. Durrell touches on this several times during Justine. But what really captivated me about Balthazar is how futile, how subversive a search for truth can be. Do any of us ever have a chance of finding out what's really true about anything? As humans, we cling to certain memories, block other things out, and color the way we remember things all the time. If you told the story of how you met your significant other to someone, and then had your significant other tell their side of the story, certain facts would be the same....but you'd have a whole other dimension to the story you were lacking before. Which one is true? Aren't both true, even though both stories have different information? You can start to see how the search for pure truth has captivated generations of philosophers.

This was the point that blew me away about Balthazar. We're tempted as readers to throw Justine in the trash and take Balthazar's account as the 'real' story...but knowing what we now know about individual truth, can we do this? Durrell masterfully not only discredits Darley as a narrator...but at the same time discredits everyone else. We learn that we cannot rely on anyone's individual chronicle as pure truth. Their stories fit together like pieces in a puzzle, but as stand-alone stories do not represent the whole truth.

As a disgusting side note, I got to experience the icky moment of seeing whoever owned this book before me writing the word "ME!" next to the sections where Pursewarden is described as picking his nose and taking his shoes off under the table in restaurant. Awesome. Excuse me while I go look for the Clorox wipes now.

Anyone looking for deep thoughts should check this one out. You really do have to read Justine first, though. Sorry.

Grade: A-

#70...The Alexandria Quartet...Justine

"Far off events, transformed by memory, acquire a burnished brilliance because they are seen in isolation, divorced from the details of before and after, the fibres and wrappings of time. The actors, too, suffer a transformation; they sink slowly deeper and deeper into the ocean of memory like weighted bodies, finding at every level a new assessment, a new evaluation in the human heart."

How much can we rely on memory as truth, and how well can we really ever know another person? Lawrence Durrell tackles these questions in Justine, the first installment of his four-part Alexandria Quartet. Set in the ancient city of Alexandria, Justine is primarily the memoir of an unnamed man and his affair with a beautiful married Jewish socialite. Because of a horrifying incident in her past, Justine finds herself unable (or unwilling?) to be monogamous and so flits from affair to affair. Although her husband Nessim is presented with strong evidence of her affairs over the years, he is unable (or unwilling?) to believe it, until Melissa, the girlfriend of the narrator, comes to Nessim with her knowledge of the affair. Thinking two wrongs make a right, Melissa and Nessim begin an affair, which results in a child. When Nessim finally takes his revenge on the man who hurt Justine, Melissa dies, and Justine inexplicably flees her life in Alexandria for a Jewish kibbutz in Palestine, the narrator adopts the child and retires to a remote island to write about his memories of Justine.

Durrell uses two very unreliable sources of information to define Justine: memory, and the stories of her discarded lovers. Before we judge her as readers, we have to take this into account. As anyone knows, the further away in time an experience is, and the more wrapped in feeling it is, the more likely our memories of the experience will be skewed. Justine's previous husband wrote a book about her, but admits that his memories of their time together may not have been completely accurate: "Did this sort of thing happen so often or is it that my memory has multiplied it? Perhaps it was only once, and the echoes have misled me." The quote from the beginning of the post also emphasizes the deceptive truth of memory. We also have to account for the bias that results from the memories of past lovers. I would never want one of my ex-boyfriends to write a book about me and have people accept that as how I am. The narrator says it best: "How much of him can I claim to know? I realize that each person can only claim one aspect of our character as part of his knowledge. To every one we turn a different face of the prism." I think most of us agree that the part of the prism that would be reflected by an ex-lover might not be the most flattering picture in the world.

Durrell also challenges us to define love. Can you love someone when being unfaithful to them? Can you love someone through an intellectual avenue rather than just purely sexually? Can you really love something without a desire to possess it? My definition of a love relationship would be monogamy and commitment, which is the more conventionally accepted format...and clearly, Justine's definition is 180 degrees different from that.

I ended the book wondering why Durrell would want us to feel so negatively about Justine. Maybe it is my personal experiences and values that turned me against her.

I liked this book. It started a bit slow but grew on me. Happily I am not as turned off about reading the next three books as I was during the first few pages of Justine.

Grade: B+

Blog Shoppin'

I "heart" used bookstores, especially since I started this blog. I have to give a shout-out to Half-Price Books for their great selection (even if I have to drive 20 minutes one way to get there) and to my husband, who unquestioningly indulges my book-buying sprees. :)

Here are today's finds, all upcoming for Journeys....

Light in August, William Faulkner
The Age of Innocence, Edith Wharton
Death Comes for the Archbishop, Willa Cather
Go Tell It On the Mountain, James Baldwin
The Rainbow, DH Lawrence
The Heart of the Matter, Graham Greene
Deliverance, James Dickey
Women In Love, DH Lawrence
The Secret Agent, Joseph Conrad
The Sun Also Rises, Ernest Hemingway

And here's the fun part...I got all of these books, in really good condition, for $38. Which averages out to $3.80 a book. Beat THAT, Barnes and Noble!!!!