Balthazar was published by Faber and Faber in 1958, one year after Justine. The novel takes the form of Darley receiving and responding to a document from Balthazar — a physician and kabbalistic mystic — who has annotated Darley’s manuscript (i.e., the text of Justine) with corrections, additions, and alternative interpretations that radically transform the meaning of every event described in the first novel.
What Darley understood as Justine’s love for him, Balthazar reveals as her love for another character entirely. What appeared to be personal drama turns out to be political conspiracy. Characters’ motivations are recast; scenes that seemed transparent become opaque; and the reader is confronted with the experience of having been seduced into a false understanding that must now be abandoned.
Durrell’s formal principle is explicitly Einsteinian (he cites relativity in his prefatory note): the first three novels of the Quartet occupy the same stretch of time, viewed from different perspectives, creating a three-dimensional portrait that no single viewpoint could provide. Only in Clea (the fourth volume) does time move forward. The analogy is to space-time: three spatial dimensions plus one temporal dimension.
Balthazar himself embodies the principle: a doctor of the body who is also a student of the kabbalah (esoteric knowledge), he represents a mode of understanding that encompasses contradiction — that can hold multiple truths simultaneously without requiring them to resolve into a single narrative.
Collecting Balthazar
First edition (Faber and Faber, London, 1958): Cloth binding, dust jacket.
Market values:
- First UK edition in dust jacket: $80–$250
- Signed first edition: $200–$600
- US first (Dutton, 1958): $30–$80
- Without jacket: $15–$35