CLEA.
London: Faber and Faber, 1960.
1st Edition. Part of THE ALEXANDRIA QUARTET. In the publisher’s original near fine orange boards with black and gilt stamping to the spine. Housed in a price-clipped dust jacket showing light edgewear and some fading featuring the iconic hand motif common to all volumes in THE ALEXANDRIA QUARTET.
CLEA is the fourth and final novel in Lawrence Durrell’s celebrated ALEXANDRIA QUARTET (JUSTINE, BALTHAZAR, MOUNTOLIVE, CLEA), and it holds a unique position in the sequence. Whereas MOUNTOLIVE provided a more objective, third-person account of the events that recontextualized the first two novels, CLEA serves as the culmination and resolution of the entire cycle—bringing emotional and philosophical closure to Durrell’s exploration of love, art, and perception in Alexandria.
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 #34226 Price: US$490.00