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Mmmmm, Dessaix. I probably shouldn't have read this book so fast, but it's got a warm-honeyish feel and I always devour hot sweet things too fast out of an absent fear that they'll cool down or congeal. It's about an Australian actor holidaying in Greece and accidentally falling into exploring the life of another Australian actor whose house he's renting, but it's about mild intellectual hypocrisy and finding meaning in other people's lives and only finding meaning in your own once you put it in a different context. And about the nature of art and friendship, and motives for travelling, and Russia, of course; all of which Dessaix can't quite seem to escape in his writing, fiction or otherwise. I don't mind.
There's a lot of Chekhov woven in; some Tolstoy, some Sappho. Gloriously decadent in that lazy way of his, but so much fun because you feel as though you picked up Under the Tuscan Sun and somehow found yourself reading a lost philosophical tract or sociocultural commentary. I like that his male characters are usually queer without being loud or even defensive about it, that the whole is quiet and natural and that the narrator's voice is familiar. He never strays far from what he knows in terms of style, and I like that too.
~
'I can see now that in knowing beauty - seizing it, I mean, and knowing it with a fierceness that leaves you unconscious of whether you've been ravishing beauty or been ravished by it - you must entertain bereavement. A poem, an orchid, a sky, a Daphnis, a Chloe - it doesn't matter what or whom you seize, for the instant you stretch out your hand to touch it, you will hear the whisper: This will die. Not the poem or the orchid, not the beloved - not this Daphnis or this Chloe - but this particular moment of enchantment, this particular experience of the orchid's or Chloe's beauty. We fear that the beauty that is making us feel so alive might prove to be nothing but what it seems. Where there was a living body, so to speak (to echo Tolstoy's perception), we fear we might soon wake to find a corpse. And so, in a frenzy, as if with passion, we try to breathe new life into it - you'll be a wife, we say, you'll be a friend, a cherished being, a beautiful memory...but you will live. An illusion, naturally - and we know it. Beauty - an embarrassing word, but I can't find a vaguer one - and mourning go hand in hand. Tolstoy got it exactly right.'
- Robert Dessaix, Corfu
There's a lot of Chekhov woven in; some Tolstoy, some Sappho. Gloriously decadent in that lazy way of his, but so much fun because you feel as though you picked up Under the Tuscan Sun and somehow found yourself reading a lost philosophical tract or sociocultural commentary. I like that his male characters are usually queer without being loud or even defensive about it, that the whole is quiet and natural and that the narrator's voice is familiar. He never strays far from what he knows in terms of style, and I like that too.
~
'I can see now that in knowing beauty - seizing it, I mean, and knowing it with a fierceness that leaves you unconscious of whether you've been ravishing beauty or been ravished by it - you must entertain bereavement. A poem, an orchid, a sky, a Daphnis, a Chloe - it doesn't matter what or whom you seize, for the instant you stretch out your hand to touch it, you will hear the whisper: This will die. Not the poem or the orchid, not the beloved - not this Daphnis or this Chloe - but this particular moment of enchantment, this particular experience of the orchid's or Chloe's beauty. We fear that the beauty that is making us feel so alive might prove to be nothing but what it seems. Where there was a living body, so to speak (to echo Tolstoy's perception), we fear we might soon wake to find a corpse. And so, in a frenzy, as if with passion, we try to breathe new life into it - you'll be a wife, we say, you'll be a friend, a cherished being, a beautiful memory...but you will live. An illusion, naturally - and we know it. Beauty - an embarrassing word, but I can't find a vaguer one - and mourning go hand in hand. Tolstoy got it exactly right.'
- Robert Dessaix, Corfu
