Clea
Written by Lawrence Durrell
Narrated by Nigel Anthony
4/5
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About this audiobook
Lawrence Durrell
Born in Jalandhar, British India, in 1912 to Indian-born British colonials, Lawrence Durrell was a critically hailed and beloved novelist, poet, humorist, and travel writer best known for the Alexandria Quartet novels, which were ranked by the Modern Library as among the greatest works of English literature in the twentieth century. A passionate and dedicated writer from an early age, Durrell’s prolific career also included the groundbreaking Avignon Quintet, whose first novel, Monsieur (1974), won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, and whose third novel, Constance (1982), was nominated for the Booker Prize. He also penned the celebrated travel memoir Bitter Lemons of Cyprus (1957), which won the Duff Cooper Prize. Durrell corresponded with author Henry Miller for forty-five years, and Miller influenced much of his early work, including a provocative and controversial novel, The Black Book (1938). Durrell died in France in 1990.
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Reviews for Clea
247 ratings12 reviews
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5All four of these novels must be read, and reread, as one. The Alexandria Quartet is perhaps the most underrated masterpiece in English literature. And this reading by Nigel Anthony is also masterful.
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- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5This is the way audiobooks should be produced! The narrator Nigel Anthony is so great that it gives this classic new life, further accentuated by excellent choice of occasional background music.
1 person found this helpful
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5In [Clea], Lawrence Durrell completes his [Alexandria Quartet] with a sequel, a more linear narrative to finally move Darley, [Justine]’s narrator, along in time, and show the effects of his earlier misunderstandings.Alexandria is transformed in World War II when Darley finally returns to the city to confront the mistakes of his earlier life there. He reunites with Clea, an artist who hovered on the edges of all of his relationships during his earlier stay, and finds a deeper and more complete love than he experienced in any of his other affairs. Continuing to reminisce, Darley sees his previous relationships and life more clearly in the context of a stable and reciprocated love.Durrell layers in much of his own vision for the [Alexandria Quartet] in sections of [Clea] where he is discussing the writing life with another author. In one passage, he definitively announces his thesis:“I mean about the mutability of all truth. Each fact can have a thousand motivations, all equally valid, and each fact a thousand faces. So many truths have little to do with fact. Your duty is to hunt them down. At each moment of time all multiplicity waits at your elbow. Why, Darley, this should thrill you and give your writing the curves of a pregnant woman.”This vision sets Durrell in a class by himself – the anti-Dickens. Rather than creating whole universes of characters, Durrell finds a handful and continually re-writes their existences, each new facet of their lives as true and credible as the last. Bottom Line: Finally a sequel to the earlier stories in the series, but still full of improvisation and twisting perception, again changing the face of the story and the characters.4 bones!!!!
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5See the review for Justine.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5This is the final book in the Alexandria Quartet. As the story opens, Darley is returning to Alexandria at the beginning of World War II. The narrative focuses on the relationship between Darley and Clea, characters introduced in earlier books. Darley was the protagonist of book one (Justine), and Clea has been a minor character up to this point. The storyline between Darley and Clea is broken by excerpts from Pursewarden’s journal. He has influenced events throughout the quartet. We learn about his views on the nature of art and the artist, along with the reason for his prior actions. This set is character-driven. The sights and sounds of a past Alexandria are featured prominently. The writing is beautiful, and I have gotten used to Durrell’s style over the course of the four books. I appreciate it more now than I did at first. It is a fitting conclusion that relates what happened to all the main characters we have come to know and love.This is my second favorite of the set. I enjoyed the final two books the most. It is really a single work told in four parts. None of the four would stand alone very well. After finishing, I appreciate the entire work more than I did while reading the individual installments. It has taken me quite a long while to get through all the books (this is a work that should not be rushed through) but am glad I took the time to read it.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5World War II has begun and Darley returns to Alexandria in wartime. He resumes the narrative, but this time he adopts the lighter chronological approach of the third book. It's a happy marriage of the two styles as he reunites with friends and the city, and most especially with Clea. She has been an interesting peripheral figure up to now, liable to be someone's love interest but stubbornly resistant to the role. A confidante mostly, a sounding board but never really a source of advice, remaining aloof and devoted to her art. She would have received less of my attention to now if her name wasn't attached to this fourth novel of the quartet. Here she becomes catalyst, as Darley works through relinquishing the scars that Alexandria and his experiences there left etched on his memory. Pursewarden's journal interrupts the flow of the story, but it is a brilliant metatextual piece where it seems like Durrell rather than the character who is speaking to the value and place of art and the artist. He positions it next to religion as a partner in healing the psyche, and explains the oblique, slanted messages that it delivers as a gateway for providing the reader a means to discover universal truths. The reader should not become too caught up in the vessel's quality but try to see through it as through a telescope to the great beyond that the author is working to forge passage to. Ultimately this quartet was Pursewarden's story, its central figure, and the realization of art its central theme. There is a price to be paid for achieving it, now or later, but a sweetness in the prize.
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Like all young men I set out to be a genius, but mercifully laughter intervened.
Wow, I didn't expect such a sudden dislike. Allow me to retreat to my hutch to scratch together a review. - Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Not a lot of plot but great prose, almost Wolfean. A good example of mid-century British writing describing friends and experiences in an Alexandria that no longer exists.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5“Clea,” the fourth volume of Lawrence Durrell’s “Alexandria Quartet,” opens with several years having passed since the events of the first three volumes. Darley, the narrator, is living on a Greek island with the six-year-old illegitimate daughter Nessim fathered with Melissa. After running into Balthazar and his Inter-Linear, he eventually heads off for Alexandria again with the child, full of both trepidation and anticipation about the past and the people he knew there.When Darley arrives in Alexandria, almost immediately he runs into his old artist friend Clea, and consummates a formerly Plutonic relationship, now that their circle of friends is unencumbered by the presence of Melissa, who has died, and Justine, who is under house arrest for the duration of the novel. More than in any of the others, this novel has several meta-fictional aspects: meditations on art, creativity, and the novel (especially as revealed with Pursewarden’s letters), and some of Clea’s ideas about painting. All of this is, as always in this tetralogy, tied in beautifully with Balthazar’s earlier analyses shot throughout the Inter-Linear.Reading these four novels has been one of the more powerful set of experiences that I have recently had. Most readers will probably not enjoy this; it’s not action-packed and full of adventure. But if you admire writing that tries to capture the uniqueness of inner coruscating experience, the complexities of passion and romantic relationships, and realizes the inability to tell “the whole story,” even after nearly one thousand pages of trying, I hope you will appreciate this as much as I did. As I said in my review of “Mountolive,” I have simply run out of things to say about how much I loved this. Sometimes admiration must finish itself off in silence.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5More conventional and more enjoyable than the other three members of the quartet: there is something like a narrative here, that is tied up at the end of the book, and there's a lot of straightforward pleasure along the way. The mood, despite the war, is rather lighter than before. Darley has at last grown up and stopped whingeing; Nessim and Justine are shunted off to glower off-stage. Scobie and Pursewarden, the two most amusing characters in the series, have a lot of posthumous input. Scobie bizarrely talks through the mouths of other characters who recite his monologues from memory; Pursewarden more conventionally through his letters and notebooks.I think it was a mistake to pause for a couple of years between reading Mountolive and Clea: it took me a while to get back into the relationships between the characters and remember what we had been told before. There's probably a lot to be said for re-reading the whole quartet quickly once you've read it once. If it ever gets back to the front of my queue...Assessment of the Quartet as a whole: Hard to say. When I started, I noted that I'm not a fan of Henry Miller, Durrell's most obvious influence. I'm much more comfortable with realist fiction. Evelyn Waugh — to name just one example — managed to capture the idea of Alexandria just as effectively and with far less fuss in a much more accessible form. All the same, I did find Durrell's exercise of digging and redigging through a story to unearth different levels of "truth" interesting and amusing (it's always fun watching someone else working) even if the conclusion that "it's all subjective" seems a bit trite after all that effort. It's undeniable that there's some very witty and beautiful writing there, and some extremely memorable minor characters. So, while it's perhaps a literary cul de sac, it does have quite a bit to offer.
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Final book of the Alexandria quartet.Experimental fiction that was reportedly a commercial and critical success when first published, it has not aged well. Some of the stylistic quirks, such as heavily quoting the words of a fictional author in the story, just seem odd, while others are just self indulgent, such as the repeated returns to quote Scobie the gay former seaman and now police officer. Still the series is impressive in the capacity to represent the same events from the perspective of different story tellers at different times, and the while thing, in my view, is not great, but a good near miss. Read June - July 2010.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5this is my favorite book by durrell. i've read it 4 times over the years and always find it inspirational.