Just an aside

to all else...

Note:

The characters and situations in this novel, the second of a group - a sibling, not a sequel to Justine - are entirely imaginary, as is the personality of the narrator.
Nor could the city be less unreal.

Modern literature offers us no unities, so I have turned to science and am trying to complete a four decker novel whose form is based on the relativity proposition.

Three sides of space and one of time constitute the soup-mix of a continuum. The four novels follow this pattern.

The three first parts however, are to be deployed spatially, (hence the use of 'sibling' not sequel) and are not linked in a serial form. They interplay interlap, interweave, in a purely spatial relation. Time is stayed. The fourth part alone will represent time and be a true sequel.

The subect-object relation is so important to relativity that I have tried to turn the novel through both subjective and objective modes. The third part, Mountolive, is a straight naturalistic novel in which the narrator of Justine and Balthazar becomes an object ie. a character.

This is not Proustian or Joycean method - for they illustrate Bergsonian "Duration" in my opinion, not 'Space-Time'.

The central topic of the book is an investigation of modern love. These considerations sound perhaps somewhat immodest or even pompous. But it would be worth trying to experiment to see if we cannot discover a morphological form one might appropriately call "classical" - for our time. Even if the result proved to be a 'science-fiction' in the true sense.

Lawrence Durrell
Ascona, 1957