A review by stevesaroff
Justine by Lawrence Durrell

5.0

It was during my time of poverty and poetry when I read Justine, the first book in The Alexandria Quartet. I was 19 years old and was living outside in Missoula, Montana. I slept mostly way up on Mount Sentinel. My small tent was hidden in the trees near the mountain's top, and each night when the library on campus closed, I would hike up to my tent. And it was a cold winter. Weeks of sub zero temperatures. Around that time I had also become friends with the poet Richard Hugo, and he had suggested I read Justine. So each night, by candle light, I would slowly read a few pages before falling asleep. Slowly because I had trouble reading then - Dyslexia - and because Durrell's poetry in his prose demanded slowness. Now transition to the book itself: it's in the 1940s in Alexandria. The narrator has suffered a conflicted love triangle, or, depending on how it is looked at, is suffering from being jilted, and to find the cure of the pain he writes. And Justine is the woman he was in love with. And this first book of the Quartet looks at the relationship head on, while each of the next 3 books look at the same settings and characters from a different perspective. Probably the best book I had ever read, and still one of the best. And, back when I was reading Justine, it was better than my hunger, my cold, the hard ground, and far better than the loneliness of homelessness. The Alexandria Quartet -- and 'Justine,' this first book, more so then the other three -- was the food that my soul so desperately needed. This book offered an explanation of why our hearts can be broken. We reach for words for the music and the story, and discover we are human by what we sometimes find: each other.