Some books must be read at a certain time. I tried to read “Catcher in the Rye” in my 20s, and I thought it was puerile. I tried later in my 40s, and I thought it was dated. The problem was me, not the book.

The same thing occurred with Lawrence Durrell’s “Alexandria Quartet,” but oppositely. In my 20s, I was enraptured with the subtitle, “An Investigation of Modern Love.” For the characters in the “Quartet,” love meant mono-, bi-, tri-, hetero-, homo-, poly and Platonic.

The real heroine of the quartet is not Justine, the eponymous focus of the first book, but Alexandria itself. Durrell is marvelous in his evocation of the sultry landscape of the city between the Mediterranean and the Sahara.

In “Justine” the narrator is called Darley, and he is one of Justine’s lovers. The hero of the books, however, is Durrell himself, as he imagined himself to be, surrounded by love which interferes with being an artist, similar to Stephen Daedalus. This portrait ends in a sea epiphany, where he is liberated by Clea, the namesake of the fourth book.

In the second book we read the same story of “Justine” from the viewpoint of Balthazar, a gay Jewish doctor in Alexandria. Durrell’s luxurious prose continues to describe intricate relationships in subtle British fashion. This is not Henry Miller or D.H. Lawrence writing, but an author interested in the psychology of love.

Mountolive is a British diplomat, and his third book is told in the third person, and the story is affected by the city during World War II. The motivations for love presented in the first two books change again in the passions of a war-driven city.

“Clea” ends this extravagant tour de force. She is an artist as Darley is an author and through both Durrell rhapsodizes on what art means when heated and tempered by love. Clea says to Darley at the end to the book, “You too have stepped across the threshold into the kingdom of your imagination, to take possession of it once and for all.”

After I finished the “Quartet,” I loaned my copy of “Justine” to a flame of mine. The book was annotated, underlined, scribbled in, and cherished. She lost it, and I lost interest in her. Ten years later I tried to read “Justine” again and found I couldn’t. Whether too old or a sadder but wiser man, I don’t know, but the “Quartet” was magical for me once.

Durrell came into my life again when I happened to be on the island of Rhodes and found that he had written a book on a statue found in the harbor there. “Reflections on a Marine Venus” was the first of several books on Greek islands by Lawrence Durrell.

“Reflections” is not a travelogue where one follows the author around the island. It is a commentary on the people inhabiting this marvelous place. Rhodes was the home of the Colossus and suffered a siege from Suleiman the Great. Lindos on the northern tip of the island has a temple to Minerva in the acropolis where the Germans put 88s in World War II. Down below in the bay of Lindos one can imagine Odysseus coming round again, still looking for a way home.

I can remember walking by the cemetery in the middle of the city just as Durrell describes. The statue of Venus, worn smooth underwater by sea currents, still wistfully beckons all who see her to stay another day and hear the murmuring of the bees.

Lawrence Durrell also wrote about Cyprus where he went after Rhodes as a British information officer post-World War II. The island was being split between the Greeks and Turks then and his title, “Bitter Lemons,” reflects the schism that still exists 55 years later. His stay was pleasant for a time, but already the internecine war was starting.

“Prospero’s Cell” is Durrell’s homage to Corfu, off the west coast of Greece. Durrell lived here several years with his family before World War II. Durrell, however, focuses on four other inhabitants of Corfu in his wanderings around the island, reputed to be the home of Ariel, Caliban, Miranda, and Prospero of Shakespeare’s “The Tempest.”

If you want to know about the Durrell family (and more about Corfu), you must read “My Family and Other Animals” by Gerald Durrell, younger brother. In it you will find “Larry” described as a stuffed-up prig, wearing ascots and quoting poetry and all that. Reading both books together is a hilarious treat in their contrasts, and Gerald is far funnier of the two.

From Corfu, Lawrence Durrell went to Alexandria, became part of the war, collected notes and experiences, and later wrote the “Alexandria Quartet.” I have followed Durrell in his books around the Mediterranean Sea and even to Paris where he was a friend of Henry Miller.

At the end I found Durrell in Provence where in his dotage he penned an homage, called “Provence,” for that fabled place. If you want an octogenarian’s view of the Romans of Provence, read it. It is better to remember the islands of Greece through Durrell and with him find love in the narrow streets of Alexandria.