Balthasar

The dazzling second volume of The Alexandria Quartet—an enthralling and deeply disturbing work of gorgeous surfaces and endless deceptions. . In Alexandra in the years before the Second World War an exiled Irish schoolteacher seeks to unravel his sexual obsession with two women: the tubercular café dancer Melissa and Justine the alluring Jewish wife of a wealthy Coptic Christian. What emerges in his sessions with the psychiatrist Balthazar however is something far more complex—and unfathomably more sinister—than neurosis. Lawrence Durrell’s kaleidoscopic narrative ushers us into a world in which no perception is reliable—and love itself is always an act of treachery.. “Durrell is one of the very best novelists of our time. . . . He has a sensuous vigorous style that I have not found equaled by any other novelist today. . . . A spontaneous resourceful new beauty that any sensitive reader will almost certainly love.”—The New York Book Review “It is difficult to sum up Balthazar; it will not be contained. It spills or slips away like smoke. The sheer writing is superb. . . . A wonderful book a book to read many times.”—The Houston Post