MOUNTOLIVE.
London: Faber and Faber, 1958.
1st Edition. Part of The Alexandria Quartet. In the publisher’s original near fine yellow boards with blue and gilt stamping to the spine. Housed in a bright dust jacket showing a nick at the head of the spine and light edgewear; price-clipped featuring the iconic hand motif common to all volumes in THE ALEXANDRIA QUARTET.
Mountolive is actually the third novel in Lawrence Durrell’s celebrated Alexandria Quartet (Justine, Balthazar, Mountolive, Clea), and it holds a unique position in the sequence. Unlike the first two novels—told from the subjective point of view of the writer Darley—Mountolive is written in the third person, offering an objective and panoramic perspective that reframes earlier events.
In a 1959 Paris Review interview, Durrell described the ideas behind The Quartet as a convergence of Eastern and Western metaphysics, influenced by Einstein’s reshaping of the material universe and Freud’s transformation of the understanding of personality—yielding a new concept of reality. In his preface to Balthazar, he explained that the four novels explore relativity, the notions of continuum, and the subject–object relationship, with modern love as their central theme.
Condition: Near fine in a very good dust jacket.
Item #34225 Price: US$790.00