Third reading: D.W. Buffa on "Justine"

D.W. Buffa's recent novel is The Privilege, the ninth legal thriller involving the defense attorney Joseph Antonelli. The tenth, Lunatic Carnival, will be published in the spring. He has also just published Neumann's Last Concert, the fourth novel in a series that attempts to trace the movement of western thought from ancient Athens, in Helen; the end of the Roman Empire, in Julian's Laughter; the Renaissance, in The Autobiography of Niccolo Machiavelli; and, finally, America in the Twentieth Century.

Buffa writes a monthly review for the Campaign for the American Reader that we're calling "Third Reading." Buffa explains. "I was reading something and realized that it was probably the third time that I knew it well enough to write something about it. The first is when I read it when I was in college or in my twenties, the second, however many years later, when I wanted to see if it was as good as I remembered, and the third when I knew I was going to have to write about it."

Buffa's "Third Reading" of Lawrence Durrell’s Justine begins:

Lawrence Durrell, quite on purpose, wrote Justine, the first of four novels that together became known as The Alexandria Quartet, like a “spiral staircase,” each step taken changing the perspective of how things are seen. “I have escaped to this island with a few books and the child — Melissa’s child,” he writes on the very first page. At night, when “the wind roars and the child sleeps quietly in the wooden cot,” he thinks about Justine and Nessim, Melissa and Balthazar and about the city, Alexandria. Alone with the child on the island, he will try to reorder reality, to show what was most significant.

He sees all this, he is determined to see all this, the way that each of us sees things in our own remembered past, not as the sequential events they were when they unfolded, but as we first come to learn about them; the way, for example, we learn, much later than it happened, a friend’s, or a lover’s, betrayal.

He will “record experiences, not in the order in which they took place — for that is history — but in the order in which they first became significant for me.” It is only here, on the island, “that I am at last able to re-enter, reinhabit the unburied city with my friends…. Here at least I am able to see their history and the city’s as one and the same phenomenon.”

Justine, the novel, is about Alexandria, the city, because Justine, the woman, is “only an extension of the spirit of the place.” With “five races, five languages,” and “more than five sexes.” Alexandria is different than other places. Everyone knows everyone, or knows something about everyone; everyone knows about Justine, married to Nessim, a man so rich that he cares nothing about money, and indeed is “possessed by a positive distaste for it.” Stranger still, Nessim “appeared to be quite faithful to Justine — an unheard of state of affairs.” Justine, however, is...[read on]

About Buffa's new novel Neumann’s Last Concert, from the publisher:

Neumann’s Last Concert is a story about music and war and the search for what led to the greatest evil in modern history. It is the story of an American boy, Wilfred Malone, who lost his father in the early days of the Second World War and a German refugee, Isaac Neumann, the greatest concert pianist of his age when he lived in Berlin, but who now lives, anonymous and alone, in a single rented room in a small town a few miles from San Francisco.

Wilfred has a genius for the piano, “a keen curiosity not yet corrupted by vanity” and “a memory that forgot nothing essential.” Neumann, alone in his room, is constantly writing, an endless labyrinth of questions and answers, driving him farther and farther back into the past, searching for the causes, searching for the meaning, of what happened in Germany, trying to understand what had led him, a German Jew, to stay in Germany when he could have left but instead continued to perform right up to the night that during his last concert they took his wife away.

Neumann’s Last Concert is a novel about the great catastrophe of the 20th century and the way in which music, great music, preserves both the hope of human decency amidst the carnage of human insanity and the possibility of what human beings might still accomplish.

Visit D.W. Buffa's website.

Third reading: The Great Gatsby. 

Third reading: Brave New World.

Third reading: Lord Jim.

Third reading: Death in the Afternoon.

Third Reading: Parade's End.

Third Reading: The Idiot.

Third Reading: The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.

Third Reading: The Scarlet Letter.

Third Reading: Justine.

--Marshal Zeringue