Constance (The Avignon quintet)

Constance or Solitary Practices (The Avignon quintet), Lawrence Durrell, Barcelona, Ed. Versal, 1982 (1985)
The third reading of Durrell’s quintet has made me the more linear and narrative copy of all previously read. Perhaps the main body of the sequence is the focus of a series of subplots and characters that interact in the midst of the other volumes. The story presents the relationship of the protagonist like the book, Constance, with her brothers Livia (who will star, apparently one of the last volumes of the series) and Hilary. Constance is moved between the memory of her husband, the late Sam and Affad’s new love, the protagonist of Sebastian. The other leading character is the writer Aubrey Blanford, with a primary role in Monsieur. It is very suggestive intertextuality between novels, specifically the reference to the literary character invented by Blanford, his alter ego as a writer and Sutcliffe referred to on this occasion (p. 30), and the authorship of fiction that he maintains on Monsieur or the Prince of Darkness (p. 304).

However, the background of the novel, the German occupation of France, specifically the sociopolitical situation in Provence, and the uneasy coexistence among its people is the basis for fiction. The gang consists of Constance, Blanford, Livia, Hilary, Quatrefages Felix Chatto and represents the longing for the idyllic Provence unoccupied youth, and we all share. An image and referenced to the castle of Monsieur Verfeuille now defined as “the merry band of Tu Duc” (p. 23).
I find the reference at the beginning of the book, Durrell in the “Author’s Note”:

“This book is a novel, not a history book.”

The warning is not free and the distance of the reality take the author either, Durrell does not want to rewrite that history, the context in which the authors move and he himself lived. The use by the events of reality is only referential. Constance could be set in other places and at other times and not lose at all interested.
Following the precious tone of earlier texts, Constance provides the reader with many reflections of extra-literary references, as the French expression between chien et loup (p. 32), Like the realization of the end of the day (boqueta nit, in our Catalan ), which also served as a text in Irène Némirovsky’s novel  Les Chiens et les Loups (1940).

The approach of the hard reality of war brings patterns of interest for the modern reader as:
“The Jews extract every last drop of blood of our horror and regret. They are masters in the art of squeezing. We’ll have to bow his head in his presence for at least a century.” (P. 245)
“All of Europe was a suicide club.” (P. 306)
“Most of love expires because of satiety and indifference.” (P. 310)
Similarly, the relationship with Mr Constance doctor, Schwarz, will be extended to Sebastian, and Cade, the maid who accompanies him in Avignon, will become the core of a story with a lot of constructive force for growth and reader. Thus, it is fully advanced the concept of romantic partners of Affad and Constance, the Sebastian of the previous novel reveals that here which is also its name (p. 245), a relationship that is defined as the characteristic of a “new era of friendship sex “(p. 263).
This is the central novel of the quintet, not in vain there are references to all others, as are the cases mentioned, plus the final reference to Quinx (p. 311), one of five wives of Gampopa within the references metaliterary of Blanford in his books, additional  evidence of the thoroughness of the narrative structure of the last great project of Lawrence Durrell.