Eros in Alexandria

JUSTINE (253 pp.)--Lawrence Durrell --Dutton ($3.50).

This extraordinary novel is a sensuous and beautifully written hymn to the "postcoital sadness" of mankind. The heroine, Justine, a slum-born Jewess of great beauty, marries Nessim, a Coptic millionaire, who suffers her infidelities in silence. Nearly every male in the book and at least one female have a try at "awakening" Justine, but she is the sort of woman "who makes her body accessible to one and yet who is incapable of delivering her true self--because she does not know where to find it."

The book is also a hymn to Alexandria, a city that has "a strong flavor without having any real character," where sects as well as sex proliferate. Between bouts of love, Justine searches for something to believe in. She learns most from Balthazar, an initiate of the cabala, whose crypticisms ("Passionate love even for a man's own wife is also adultery") leave her in such a state that "at night you can hear her brain ticking like a cheap alarm-clock."

Twisted Roads. While Justine is in the process of finding herself, those around her are losing their heads. Her complaisant husband goes quietly mad: her current lover, an itinerant Irish schoolmaster, betrays a tubercular girl friend and she dies; her first seducer, Capodistria, whose memory has obsessed her all along, is brutally murdered. In the end, Justine flees to a kibbutz in Palestine, where she becomes fat, competent and, presumably, content.

These are the bones of the story, but it is fleshed with verbal luxuriance and approached by a dozen roads as twisted and surprising as the narrow alleyways in the dense Attarine Quarter. Justine is seen from many angles--through the despairing eyes of her first husband, in her own diary, through the cool and critical intelligence of Clea, a woman painter. Nessim discusses Justine endlessly; the Irish narrator seeks to define and grasp her attraction. Clea perhaps comes closest when she says: "After all Justine cannot be justified or excused. She simply and magnificently is; we have to put up with her, like original sin."

Quicklime Kisses. Author Durrell, 45, is a poet and wanderer who was born in India of Irish parents, as was his zoologist brother Gerald (My Family and Other Animals--TIME, April 15). His novel, The Black Book, published in Paris in 1938, was hailed by T. S. Eliot as "the first piece of work by a new English writer to give me any hope for the future of prose fiction." Unfortunately, Justine's most effective moments are not those of the novelist but of the poet. The evocation of Alexandria in singing, interpolated paragraphs has more reality than the delineation of the principal characters. When the book is finished the people fade, but the riddles of existence and the cruelties of love remain as vivid images. And Alexandria remains as well, with its dusttormented streets, its lemony sunlight, where even the sulky young "struggle for breath and in every summer kiss they can detect the taste of quicklime."

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