Balthazar
Condition: SECONDHAND
This is a secondhand book. The jacket image is a photograph of the exact copy we have in stock. This image shows the condition of this book. Further condition remarks are below.
Condition remarks:
Book: Fair
Jacket: Chipped and worn with some minor damage
Pages: Yellowed
In the shimmering, sun-drenched city of Alexandria, Egypt, love, art, and truth collide in ways that shatter every certainty — and Balthazar, the second volume of Lawrence Durrell's celebrated Alexandria Quartet, masterfully chronicles the dismantling and reconstruction of a narrator's understanding of the events recounted in its predecessor, Justine. The enigmatic physician Balthazar returns the manuscript of the first novel to its author covered in devastating corrections, revealing that the passionate entanglements and secret lives of Alexandria's bohemian elite are far more complex, deceptive, and morally ambiguous than previously understood. Durrell presents a world where multiple realities coexist simultaneously, and where the pursuit of love is inseparable from the pursuit of self-deception. A landmark of 20th-century British modernist literature, Balthazar illustrates Durrell's extraordinary ambition: to apply the principles of relativity and the multi-perspectival nature of reality to the novel form itself. His prose is richly lyrical and sensuously detailed, conjuring Alexandria as a mythic, almost hallucinatory landscape populated by unforgettable characters — diplomats, mystics, poets, and lovers — all bound together by secrets they cannot bring themselves to speak. The novel argues that truth is not a fixed point but a prism, and that every act of narration is also an act of profound distortion — a revelation that will leave the reader questioning everything they thought they knew.
Author: Lawrence Durrell
Format: Hardback
Published: 1958, Faber and Faber
Genre: Modern fiction
Condition remarks:
Book: Fair
Jacket: Chipped and worn with some minor damage
Pages: Yellowed
In the shimmering, sun-drenched city of Alexandria, Egypt, love, art, and truth collide in ways that shatter every certainty — and Balthazar, the second volume of Lawrence Durrell's celebrated Alexandria Quartet, masterfully chronicles the dismantling and reconstruction of a narrator's understanding of the events recounted in its predecessor, Justine. The enigmatic physician Balthazar returns the manuscript of the first novel to its author covered in devastating corrections, revealing that the passionate entanglements and secret lives of Alexandria's bohemian elite are far more complex, deceptive, and morally ambiguous than previously understood. Durrell presents a world where multiple realities coexist simultaneously, and where the pursuit of love is inseparable from the pursuit of self-deception. A landmark of 20th-century British modernist literature, Balthazar illustrates Durrell's extraordinary ambition: to apply the principles of relativity and the multi-perspectival nature of reality to the novel form itself. His prose is richly lyrical and sensuously detailed, conjuring Alexandria as a mythic, almost hallucinatory landscape populated by unforgettable characters — diplomats, mystics, poets, and lovers — all bound together by secrets they cannot bring themselves to speak. The novel argues that truth is not a fixed point but a prism, and that every act of narration is also an act of profound distortion — a revelation that will leave the reader questioning everything they thought they knew.