Clea

Clea is the fourth book of Lawrence Durrell’s tetralogy, The Alexandria Quartet, whose first three parts include Justine, Balthazar, and Mountolive. Clea adds to the quartet a temporal dimension. The love story it tells parallels the process of artistic creation; it concludes like a symphony, announcing the eternal awakening of the heraldic universe, in which the reader also participates. As Pursewarden states, the reader is the poet; we are all poets: the statue must come away from the awkward marble block that shelters it and begin to live.