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A review by flanandsorbet
The Alexandria Quartet by Lawrence Durrell
1.0
I read the first half of Justine with creeping certainty that its themes of love and passion were really the author's defense of male sexual vanity. After reflection, I feel that the author went further--this is a work of profound misogyny. This lush, beautifully written book carefully details, with great artistic restraint, how a young woman's sexuality was destroyed by childhood sexual abuse. But rather than allow her or any of her seemingly thousands of lovers any insight, even after she is analyzed by Sigmund Freud, into how she became a "nymphomaniac", her promiscuity serves as a tantalizing allure for men and it seems, readers of this book. Ick.
I put the book down, for good, when distraught Justine confesses to her husband that a relative raped her when she was a child, and she cannot stop thinking about her rapist. The husband responds, not with rage, but jealosy. Jealosy. The husband becomes obsessed with the man who raped his wife not because the rapist permanently damaged her ability to experience sexual intimacy, but because the husband wishes he could have been the one to leave that indelible mark.
Now that I have reached that key scene, the earlier part of the book makes sense. Durrell has written a massive opus on sexual grooming. But the grooming victims are not his characters, they are his readers. The main character of this novel, the city of Alexandria, is a picturesquely decaying sink of history, cultures and sexual license. The men in book are in endless search of new prostitutes. Within the first few pages, Durrell lets us know that if we are worldly and urbane, we will accept this as normal. If you, the reader, want to be a sophisticate, you must accept that men sexually abuse women and children, and that the damage inflicted on them is a marvelous, perplexing mystery about love and sex. Any other interpretation is unimaginable, will not be considered by Durrell. This, briefly, is what it must feel like to be possessed by male sexual vanity. That Durrell gives such careful clues about how Justine became damaged, and because they are consistent with what we know about the behavior of sexual abuse victims, this book reads as an overwrought, monstrous apologia to the indefensible.
I put the book down, for good, when distraught Justine confesses to her husband that a relative raped her when she was a child, and she cannot stop thinking about her rapist. The husband responds, not with rage, but jealosy. Jealosy. The husband becomes obsessed with the man who raped his wife not because the rapist permanently damaged her ability to experience sexual intimacy, but because the husband wishes he could have been the one to leave that indelible mark.
Now that I have reached that key scene, the earlier part of the book makes sense. Durrell has written a massive opus on sexual grooming. But the grooming victims are not his characters, they are his readers. The main character of this novel, the city of Alexandria, is a picturesquely decaying sink of history, cultures and sexual license. The men in book are in endless search of new prostitutes. Within the first few pages, Durrell lets us know that if we are worldly and urbane, we will accept this as normal. If you, the reader, want to be a sophisticate, you must accept that men sexually abuse women and children, and that the damage inflicted on them is a marvelous, perplexing mystery about love and sex. Any other interpretation is unimaginable, will not be considered by Durrell. This, briefly, is what it must feel like to be possessed by male sexual vanity. That Durrell gives such careful clues about how Justine became damaged, and because they are consistent with what we know about the behavior of sexual abuse victims, this book reads as an overwrought, monstrous apologia to the indefensible.