Lawrence Durrell: Justine

One of my New Year's resolutions was to read as much of Lawrence Durrell's works this year as I could.  Today I begin with Justine, which is only appropriate since my first introduction to his writings was this work.  Several decades ago, I was in grad school and on the reading list for a course in 20th century novels (or perhaps 20th century English novels) was Justine.  I had heard of Lawrence Durrell and the Alexandria Quartet, but I had never read anything by him before.

I started reading and was confused and bewildered by the first three or four pages as it seemed to be nothing but randomly placed paragraphs with no coherent plan to structure them.  I was a bit dismayed, a complete novel like this!   Then the following jumped out at me.  It wasn't the first sentence of a chapter, or even of a paragraph.  It was buried in a longish paragraph, but I had to stop and read it again, and again.  It told me what Durrell was up to.  I was hooked. I read Justine and then went on to read as much of Durrell as I could find.   Now, it's time to do it again.

The sentence:

"The solace of such work as I do with brain and heart lies in this--that only there, in the silences of the painter or the writer can reality be reordered, reworked and made to show its significant side."



I doubt if it grabs others the way it grabbed me, and I can't explain why.  It just did.