The Alexandria Quartet - Book 2
Balthazar
“Lawrence Durrell’s Justine was certainly one of the finest novels of the last ten years. If anything, Balthazar is more convincing…Durrell is moving up, onto the highest levels of the novelist’s art.”
The Nation
Winner of the AudioFile Earphones Award
An AudioFile Best Audiobook of the Year
‘The politics of love, the intrigues of desire, good and evil, virtue and caprice, 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, and Pursewarden the writer; new figures emerge and play key roles. Balthazar, in his ‘Interlinear’, explains and warns.
Praise