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Description

This is an auction for BALTHAZAR by Lawrence Durrell.

Volume Two of the Alexandria Quartet.

This is a Folio Society hardback in its original slipcase.

From Wikipedia:

"Balthazar, published in 1958, is the second volume in the Alexandria Quartet by British author Lawrence Durrell. Set in Alexandria, Egypt around WWII, the four novels tell essentially the same story from different points of view and come to a conclusion in Clea. Balthazar is the first novel in the series that presents a competing narrator, Balthazar, who writes back to the narrating Darley in his "great interlinear"... The book begins with the Narrator living on a remote Greek island with Nessim's illegitimate daughter from Melissa (now either four or six years old – marking the time that has elapsed since the events of Justine); however the tone is very dark and opposed to the light and airy reminiscence of Prospero's Cell – Durrell's travelogue-memoir of his life on Corfu. The prolonged nature-pieces, which are a highlight of Durrell's prose, still intervene between straight linear narrative – but are uniformly of askesis and alone-ness – and have a more pronounced "prose-painting" feel to them pre-figuring Clea... Durrell writes in the Author's Note : "The central topic of the book is an investigation of modern love...." What he means by the term, he leaves undefined but the subject-matter: prolonged affairs between the protagonists, mutual synchronous polygamy, homoeroticism and transvestitism, psychological and actual sado-masochism – with nary a hint of a socially-conventional romantic or sexual relationship – gives the reader a pretty good clue as to what he is about."