BALTHAZAR.
London: Faber and Faber, 1957.
1st Edition. Part of THE ALEXANDRIA QUARTET. In the publisher’s original near fine blue boards with red and gilt stamping to the spine. Housed in a price-clipped dust jacket showing light edgewear, featuring the iconic hand motif common to all volumes in THE ALEXANDRIA QUARTET.
BALTHAZAR is the second novel in Lawrence Durrell’s celebrated ALEXANDRIA QUARTET (JUSTINE, BALTHAZAR, MOUNTOLIVE, CLEA), and it holds a unique position in the sequence. Like JUSTINE, it is told primarily from the subjective point of view of the writer Darley, offering deep psychological insight into the characters and events in Alexandria, but it also begins to layer in additional perspectives that prepare the reader for the more objective viewpoint of MOUNTOLIVE.
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 #34227 Price: US$450.00