Mountolive
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: No dust jacket
Pages: Good
Condition remarks: Condition as shown in image
Set against the shimmering, labyrinthine world of Alexandria, Egypt, Mountolive is the third volume of Lawrence Durrell's celebrated Alexandria Quartet, a tetralogy widely regarded as one of the greatest achievements in twentieth-century English prose. This installment pivots dramatically from its predecessors — Justine and Balthazar — shifting the narrative into the third person to follow David Mountolive, a British diplomat whose idealistic career collides catastrophically with a covert political conspiracy rooted in the lives of characters the reader already knows with intimate complexity. Where the earlier novels immersed the reader in subjectivity and sensation, this volume presents the cold, clarifying light of political reality, refracting the same events through an entirely new prism. Durrell's style — at once lyrical and architecturally precise — transforms Alexandria itself into a living, breathing protagonist, a city of erotic intrigue, colonial tension, and metaphysical yearning. Mountolive argues that truth is never singular, that every human drama contains competing narratives of equal validity, and it is this radical relativism that gives the Alexandria Quartet its enduring intellectual force. For the reader who has followed the Quartet's maze of passion and betrayal, this volume delivers a reckoning that is as devastating as it is inevitable — and leaves one immediately reaching for the final, revelatory Clea.
Author: Lawrence Durrell
Format: Paperback
Genre: Modern fiction
Condition remarks:
Book: Fair
Jacket: No dust jacket
Pages: Good
Condition remarks: Condition as shown in image
Set against the shimmering, labyrinthine world of Alexandria, Egypt, Mountolive is the third volume of Lawrence Durrell's celebrated Alexandria Quartet, a tetralogy widely regarded as one of the greatest achievements in twentieth-century English prose. This installment pivots dramatically from its predecessors — Justine and Balthazar — shifting the narrative into the third person to follow David Mountolive, a British diplomat whose idealistic career collides catastrophically with a covert political conspiracy rooted in the lives of characters the reader already knows with intimate complexity. Where the earlier novels immersed the reader in subjectivity and sensation, this volume presents the cold, clarifying light of political reality, refracting the same events through an entirely new prism. Durrell's style — at once lyrical and architecturally precise — transforms Alexandria itself into a living, breathing protagonist, a city of erotic intrigue, colonial tension, and metaphysical yearning. Mountolive argues that truth is never singular, that every human drama contains competing narratives of equal validity, and it is this radical relativism that gives the Alexandria Quartet its enduring intellectual force. For the reader who has followed the Quartet's maze of passion and betrayal, this volume delivers a reckoning that is as devastating as it is inevitable — and leaves one immediately reaching for the final, revelatory Clea.