Resumo de The Alexandria Quartet

Alexandria Quartet is a great novel which was published in the sixties of the last century by an Indian born writer, Lawrence Durrell. Hundreds of Ph.Ds have been awarded to research students for working on this novel. It seems that the more research is done, the more remains to be unearthed. In every two years, The Lawrence Durrell Society conducts international Lawrence Durrell conference and there is a journal named Deus Loci , bringing out all the important papers presented at the conferences. It is difficult to highlight all the qualities of this novel in a brief abstract.There are four novels in the Quartet, Justine, Balthazar, Mountolice, and Clea. Durrell used Einstein's relativity theory for its structure, calling it a relativity poem. The time doesn't move in the first three. The first novel reveals the story from the subjective point of view. The same story is retold in the second, but the truth observed by the protagonist in the first novel is upset, when the same events are reported relatively, from the perspective of another person. The third one gives the same account in an objective way. In the last one, events move in time. Thus it becomes a space-time continuum.But, this great novel is also an investigation of love.The readers have to move through different labyrinths in order to reach the core of the story. Durrell claims that the story is like a Chinese box. The ideas, like the events, are in multiple layers. Sometimes, you meet Freud, but suddenly Buddha replaces him. Or, are we in the midst of Antony and Cleopatra? There are three main female characters. They represent different aspects of womanhood, mainly the sexual aspects. Melissa is submissive, an Oriental woman.Justine, who was raped in her childhood carries the Freudian check in her psyche. This makes all her relationships with men complicated. No one is able to possess her. She is the anti-thesis to Melissa. The third, Clea, is the synthesis. She has absolute control over her passion. Darley moves through these women only to discover his own self.In short,the story is a quest, to discover one's own self. And the prose? Durrell's skill to use English language is superb. It is an epic. The East and the West merge in this novel to make it a world novel.

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