Balthazar (novel)
First UK edition
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| Author | Lawrence Durrell |
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| Country | United Kingdom |
| Language | English |
| Series | The Alexandria Quartet |
| Publisher | Faber and Faber |
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Publication date
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1958 |
| Media type | Print (Paperback and Hardback) |
| Preceded by | Justine |
| Followed by | Mountolive |
Balthazar, published in 1958, is the second volume in The Alexandria Quartet series by British author Lawrence Durrell. Set in Alexandria, Egypt around World War II, 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."
Durrell initially titled the book Justine II in his drafts. The novel includes several last minute changes to the publisher's proofs, perhaps most significantly the replacement and expansion of the novel's introductory Note. The NOTE begins: "The characters and situations in this novel, the second of a group – a sibling, not a sequel to JUSTINE...." And later: "Three sides of space and one of time constitute the soup-mix recipe of a continuum. The four novels follow this pattern. the three first parts, however, are to be deployed spatially...and are not linked in a serial form. They interlap, interweave, in a purely spatial relation. Time is stayed. The fourth part alone will represent time and be a true sequel...." The corrected proofs are held in the McPherson Library at the University of Victoria.
Both the epigraphs are from de Sade's Justine; the second, longer one begins: "Yes, we insist upon these details, you veil them with a decency which removes all their edge of horror; there remains only what is useful to whoever wishes to become familiar with man;....Inhabited by absurd fears, they only discuss the puerilities with which every fool is familiar and dare not, by turning a bold hand to the human heart, offer its gigantic idiosyncrasies to our view."
The book is dedicated to Durrell's mother: "these memorials of an unforgotten city".
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.
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