No formal attempt is made at structure or even at rendering the story easy to follow: if you don't get a subtle or a learned reference, so much the worse for you. Letting his memory range freely over many people, many incidents, many years, the narrator recounts only those significant "manifestations" which occur to him naturally -Īnd, as we say of actors in a play, in the order of their appearance. The story is told by the "epiphany" method of James Joyce. Melissa dies, and the narrator adopts her child, whose father is Nessim. Nessim shoots another man and Justine leaves all of them to go to Palestine and immolate her beauty and her elegance on a Communist farm. The narrator does not get killed, however
The narrator has a love affair with Justine, and at the book's climax fears that Nessim is going to arrange to kill him "accidentally" at a fashionable duck shoot outside the Egyptian seaport. The narrator is a penniless young Irish school teacher who givesĪ lecture on poetry and is about to go home to his mistress, a sad Greek dancing girl named Melissa, when he is sought out by the book's heroine, Justine, a beautiful Jewess married to Nessim, a sensitive Coptic millionaire.
The time is not stated, but it may be the Nineteen Thirties. The scene is dusty, modern Alexandria, and the milieu one that mixes exceptional sophistication with exceptional sordidness. Is peculiarly significant and encouraging. Durrell has become a truly important writer, and one whose development, as revealed in this volume (the first of a trilogy) It treats also of recollected experiences of love, with Proust's "Remembrance of Things Past." Mr. Eliot introduced with extraordinary praise, and "Cefalu" (1947), which was better but neither of them prepared me for a book that demands comparison with the very best books of our century and specifically, since I respected Lawrence Durrell's previous novels, "The Black Book" (1938), His is the best work of fiction I have read in some years. AugIt Happened in Alexandria By GERALD SYKES
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