Robert Dessaix

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..."

And So Forth

On humbug

One Sunday afternoon in a secluded valley in Normandy, Robert Dessaix chanced upon the castle where the famous French writer Andre Gide spent his childhood. Recalling the excitement Robert felt when he first read Gide as a teenager, he set 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, Robert 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. Featuring meditations and conversations with fellow travellers on such diverse subjects as why we travel, growing old, illicit passions, and the essence of Protestantism - and illustrated with over 100 stunning illustrations and photos - Arabesques is Robert Dessaix and travel memoir at their absolute finest.

A Tale of Double Lives

Arabesques

One Easter a young actor, far from home, rents a house from a writer he's never heard of called Kester Berwick, and becomes fascinated by the absent Berwick's rootless, self-invented existence. Gradually, he finds his own life strangely echoing the absent writer's, as Corfu's eccentric expatriate community opens up to him. But is travelling a search or an escape? Is stillness stultifying or liberating? And where do love, sex and friendship fit? CORFU is also a meditation on literary landscapes, from Homer and Sappho to Chekhov and C.P. Cavafy. Dessaix is alive to Corfu's ghosts - Odysseus, washed up naked on the shore to be found by the princess Nausicca; Elisabeth, Empress of Austria, who, hopelessly adrift on dreams of Homer, built a palace called Achilleon; and Berwick himself, the absent centre where all these stories meet.

A Novel

Corfu

In today's crazily busy world the importance of making time for leisure is more vital than ever. Yet so many of us lack a talent for it. We are working longer hours, consuming more than ever before; technology erodes the work-life balance further; increasingly, people feel that only work gives existence meaning. In a world where time is money, what is the value of walking without purpose, socialising without networking, nesting when we could be on our laptops? Robert Dessaix shows, in this thoughtful and witty book, how taking leisure seriously gives us back our freedom - to enjoy life, to revel in it, in fact; to deepen our sense of who we are as human beings. He explains how we can reclaim our right to 'rest well', and to loaf, groom, nest and play, as he looks at leisure from many angles- reading, walking, travelling, learning languages, taking siestas and simply doing nothing. The result is a terrifically lively and engaging conversation that reminds us that at leisure we are at our most intensely and pleasurably human.

The Pleasures of Leisure

Amanda Lohrey

Drusilla Modjeska

Secrets

Autobiography of the noted Australian arts journalist who was adopted as a baby during WWII in Sydney and who, as an adult, traced his natural mother and established a new relationship with her. Also relates his experiences as a student in Moscow during the Cold War years.

A Mother's Disgrace

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 he reflects on questions of mortality, seduction and the search for paradise in deeply life-enhancing ways.

A Journey Through Switzerland and Italy

Night Letters

Helen Daniel

First issue of an annual collection of writing by both well-known and new Australian writers. Includes stories, poems and extracts from novels-in-progress, on both familiar and exotic themes. Authors include Mark Henshaw, David Ireland, Kate Grenville, Peter Mathers, Ron Flood, Brian Castro and Carmel Bird. Includes notes on contributors. Daniel is a Melbourne writer and critic. Dessaix edited 'The Oxford Anthology of Australian Gay and Lesbian Writing'.

Picador New Writing

Following in the footsteps of the Russian writer Ivan Turgenev through Germany, France and finally Russia, Dessaix talks to his readers not just about this superb novelist and his books but about his own growing kinship with Turgenev over the years and his lifelong passion for Russia.

Travels with Turgenev

Twilight of Love

'The first time around these pieces were not widely heard or read. A roomful of festival-goers in Sydney or Penang or Ballarat could well have heard me hold forth on the subject of Enid Blyton, say, or kissing, it’s true, and a few of my newspaper articles – my feuilletons, as I’m calling them – may have caught the eye of some readers of the Byron Shire Echo some years ago. It’s not that these audiences were unappreciative, but they were limited. Nowadays a podcast can attract an audience of tens of thousands around the globe, while I performed for the most part in more intimate spaces – these were entertainments, so to speak, for un-known friends.' No festival organiser, newspaper editor or publisher who has worked with Robert Dessaix is likely to have escaped a request for copies of his wonderful, fleeting talks and short works, or feuilletons. These ephemeral pieces — including an overlooked short story ('not my usual genre, but [it] is also a performance, after all, a turn, a numéro, about love’) — are the work of a conjurer whose words dazzle, then seem to vanish almost as soon as they arrive. They are collected, and often annotated, for the very first time in Abracadabra. From the wonder of learning foreign languages, to ‘the words I wished I’d said’, Abracadabra is brimming with the thoughtful, witty and humorous observations for which Dessaix is known, and proves, once again, that his way with words is equally magical on the stage as it is on the page. Part memoir and personal record, Abracadabra is a work many years in the making, an engrossing collection of observations and ideas which remind us why we read: for pleasure, after all.

Abracadabra

Witty, acerbic, insightful musings from Robert Dessaix, one of Australia's finest writers. 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.

What Days Are For

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.

The Time of Our Lives

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.

On Humbug

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

Robert Dessaix

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