Word: darley
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...splendidly begun in Justine (TIME, Aug. 26, 1957) and Balthazar (TIME, Aug. 25, 1958). Most of the same characters are still loping through the bedrooms and back alleys of Alexandria: Pursewarden, the slightly mad novelist-diplomat; Justine, the dark-browed, amoral Jewess; Nessim, her millionaire Coptic Christian husband; Darley, the sad-sack Irish schoolteacher; Melissa, the tuberculous Greek dancer. But the protagonist of this new book is a relative newcomer, David Mountolive, who returns to Egypt as British ambassador after having lived there in his youth...
Again the novel's narrator is Darley, a seedy, itinerant Irish schoolteacher. Again the plot concerns his sexual and soulful involvements with Justine, a feline Egyptian Jewess; Nessim, her millionaire husband; Melissa, a tubercular Greek dancer. There is also an assortment of other exotics, who seem to have crawled from beneath a blistered and immemorial stone of Alexandria-Scobie, the transvestite policeman; Toto de Brunei, who dies with a hatpin rammed through his brain; Capodistria, the goatish sybarite; hare-lipped Narouz, who carries a severed head in his saddlebag; Pursewarden, who has discovered "the uselessness of having opinions...
Space & Time. In Justine, Narrator Darley drew what he thought were final conclusions from his own experience: he supplied answers as he saw them to Justine's nymphomania, Nessim's seeming complaisance and incipient madness, Melissa's tortured love. In Balthazar, an all-seeing, cabalistic doctor gives a rude shake to this picture and, as in a kaleidoscope, all the parts fall into radically changed patterns. Darley learns that Justine only pretended to love him, that he was used as a decoy to conceal her passion...
Pursewarden, who might thereby escape Nessim's slow-burning revenge. Darley would willingly have died at Justine's command, but Pursewarden, her real love, considers Justine merely "a tiresome old sexual turnstile through which presumably we must all pass...
...thoroughbred is a member of a specific breed of running horse, pedigreed descendants in, the direct male line to one or other of three specific "founding fathers"-the Byerly Turk, imported into England in 1689, the Darley Arabian, in 1704, the Godolphin Arabian, in 1728.* All other "pedigreed" animals, whatever their genus, species, breed or variety, are "purebred" or "standardbred." Racing harness horses, pacers or trotters are standardbreds, no matter how much thoroughbred blood may have been used in that breed's creation. All dogs which are not cross-breds or mongrels, but members of established recognized breeds...