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Arabesques
One Sunday afternoon in a secluded valley in Normandy, Robert Dessaix chanced upon the castle where the 20th-century French writer Andre Gide spent his childhood. Recalling the excitement he felt when he first read Gide as a teenager, Dessaix sets off to recapture what it was that once drew him so strongly to this enigmatic figure. On a magic carpet ride from Lisbon to the edge of the Sahara, from Paris to the south of France and Algiers, he takes us to the places where the Nobel Prize winning author, in ways still scandalous to modern sensibilities, lived out his unconventional ideas about love, marriage, sexuality and religion. Praise for Arabesques by Robert Dessaix ‘Magical and inviting … these arabesques afford the reader inordinate pleasure.’ Livres-Hebdo (France) ‘Surrender to the ravishments first, get lost, skid with thrilled indecisiveness across the mosaic tile of each page. Venture out with the author onto the roads and dizzying crossroads he negotiates as he plots a course between past and present, old haunts and new horizons, in the lands of Araby …’ The Age
What Days Are For
One Sunday night in Sydney, Robert Dessaix collapses in a gutter in Darlinghurst, and is helped to his hotel by a kind young man wearing a T-shirt that says FUCK YOU. What follows are weeks in hospital, tubes and cannulae puncturing his body, as he recovers from the heart attack threatening daily to kill him. While lying in the hospital bed, Robert chances upon Philip Larkin s poem "Days." What, he muses, have his days been for? What and who has he loved and why? This is vintage Robert Dessaix. His often surprisingly funny recollections range over topics as eclectic as intimacy, travel, spirituality, enchantment, language, and childhood, all woven through with a heightened sense of mortality."
The Time of Our Lives
What’s the key to the art of growing older well? Is it an art that anyone can cultivate? How should we confront dying and death in a secular age? What about sex when we’re older? What about loneliness? (And, for that matter, what about facelifts?) At the height of his powers in this remarkable (and often witty) book, Robert Dessaix addresses these increasingly urgent questions in inimitable prose and comes up with some surprising answers. From Java to Hobart via Berlin, Dessaix invites us to eavesdrop on his intimate, no-nonsense conversations about ageing with friends and chance acquaintances. Reflecting on time, religion, painting, dancing and even grandchildren, Dessaix takes us on an enlivening journey across the landscape of growing older. Riffing on writers and thinkers from Plato to Eva Hoffman, he homes in on the crucial importance of a rich inner life. The Time of Our Lives is a wise and timely exploration of not just the challenges but also the many possibilities of old age.
A Mother's Disgrace
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Twilight of Love
Winner of the Victorian Premier’s Literary Award Winner of the Margaret Scott Prize For forty years, until the day he died, Ivan Turgenev, one of the greatest novelists of Russia’s Golden Age, was passionately devoted to the diva Pauline Viardot. He followed her and her husband around Europe, even living with them amicably at times as part of their household. Yet as far as we know, the relationship with Pauline was chaste. What then did Turgenev mean by ‘love’, the word at the core of his life and work? In a remarkable work of memoir, literary biography and travel writing, Robert Dessaix has found the pulse that still quickened Turgenev’s age, but has failed in ours. Praise for Twilight of Love by Robert Dessaix ‘The most inventive portrait of a writer’s life and legacy since Flaubert’s Parrot.’ The Independent ‘A marvellous and unusual book.’ The Sunday Times
On Humbug
With his trademark eloquence and humour, Robert Dessaix, one of Australia's eminent writers, tackles humbug in the modern world-the tide of mumbo jumbo where words fall short of what they mean and motivations are not always what they appear.
Night Letters
Winner of the Australian Literature Society Gold Medal Shortlisted for the Miles Franklin Literary Award Every night for twenty nights in a hotel room in Venice, an Australian man recently diagnosed with an incurable disease writes a letter home to a friend. In these letters, against a rich background of earlier journeys in literature, with Dante as his imagined guide, he reflects on what it means to live a good life in the face of death. Praise for Night Letters by Robert Dessaix ‘Dessaix writes with great elegance, with passion, compassion and sly wit. Literally, a wonderful book.’ John Banville ‘An absolutely unique book: intelligent, funny, rich, tender at the right moments, a plum pudding of stories, observations and discoveries.’ Alberto Manguel ‘Night Letters is exhilarating. The goads, the teasing, the question marks fired up into the atmosphere make any passive reading of it quite impossible.’ The Sydney Morning Herald
And So Forth
A selection of short fiction, essays and articles from the last 10 years in which the author "offers insights into the many selves at play behind the mask of well-known broadcaster and author..."
Corfu
‘House in Gastouri for rent for 2 mths. Occupant travelling. Reasonable rent.’ In a village on the island of Corfu, alone in the cottage of a man he’s never met, a young Australian actor pieces together the strange life story of the Australian writer whose house he’s living in. As he explores his surroundings and makes new friends, his own life begins to appear to him like an illuminating shadowplay of his absent host’s. Set in the physical landscapes of the Greek islands, Adelaide and the suburbs of London, Robert Dessaix’s second novel is about the nature of friendship, love, the ordinary and extraordinary. At its core is a perfectly placed meditation on literary landscapes – Homer, Sappho, Cavafy and Chekhov – and the part art can play in making our lives beautiful. Praise for Corfu by Robert Dessaix ‘Robert Dessaix is one of Australia’s finest writers, as this sad, funny and moving novel proves.’ John Banville ‘Robert Dessaix is some kind of national treasure because he represents with a kind of Helpmann-like elegance and virtuosity the side of our sensibilities we publicly repress.’ Australian Book Review
The Pleasures of Leisure
'Almost everybody I know has done it at least once. Some of my friends indulge on a regular basis. Women seem especially susceptible to giving it a go. I've been at it since I was at least five. What on earth do we imagine we're doing?' Many of us lack a talent for leisure. We are working longer hours as we consume more than ever before, and as new forms of technology erode the work-life balance. And yet, we often feel that only work can give real meaning to our existence. In a world where time is money, what is the value of walking without purpose, or socialising without networking, or travelling for reasons other than our jobs? Robert Dessaix lays out the dilemma that modern Westerners fac...
