Robert Dessaix
In the last however many years, we have seen the rise of a kind of faction in this country which has enabled people like Drusilla Modjeska and Brian Matthews to show what scintillation and what fireworks may follow when the life of the mind (with whatever attendant discursive zigzagging) allows itself to imagine a world ...
... (read more)Chris Wallace-Crabbe reviews 'Arabesques: A tale of double lives' by Robert Dessaix
Who is, or rather who was, André Gide? I ask this because a distinguished editor warned me, on hearing that I was about to review Robert Dessaix’s enticing new book, that nowadays nobody would remember who Gide was. Ah, the years, the years! It was another story in the time of my youth ...
... (read more)Robert Dessaix reviews 'The Origins of Dislike' by Amit Chaudhuri
There is something oddly Jesuitical about this arresting, if not quite thrilling, collection of essays in defence of Modernism (and so modernity). It may be Krishna that Amit Chaudhuri champions, rather than Catholic doctrine, or at least Krishna’s delight in ‘the infinitely tantalizing play, chicanery, and ...
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‘Nothing matters very much,’ says Hilary Spinster, one of the main characters in Philip Hensher’s mammoth mêlée of a novel, ‘and most things don’t matter at all’. How true, we think to ourselves, how liberating! Is this the aphorism (borrowed from Lord Salisbury) that will finally pinpoint the Big Idea underlying ...
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House of Names is a grim book, as any retelling of Aeschylus’s Oresteia is bound to be. It is a tale to harrow up your soul, to make your two eyes start from their spheres – or at least, it is until ten pages before the end, when Elektra cracks the book’s first joke and the tone becomes a touch mellower.
... (read more)David McCooey reviews 'The Pleasures of Leisure' by Robert Dessaix
The Last Resort (1986), a photobook by Martin Parr, includes a photograph of a woman sunbaking in the English seaside resort of New Brighton. The woman is lying, facedown and topless, on a concrete ramp, directly in front of the caterpillar tracks of a gigantic excavator ...
... (read more)Reading Australia: 'A Mother's Disgrace' by Robert Dessaix
On the day that Robert Dessaix first came face to face with his birth mother, he was already in his mid-forties. Adopted as a newborn baby in 1944 by a couple who loved and cared for him through his childhood and adolescence, he had grown up in Sydney, had invented his own imaginary land with its own language, had been married for twelve years, divorced, negotiated ...
Robert Dessaix
Monday, 12 September 2016
Robert Dessaix is a writer, broadcaster, essayist, and memoirist. His best-known books are the autobiography A Mother's Disgrace (1994), the novels Night Letters (1996) and Corfu (2001), and the travel ...
Open Page with Robert Dessaix
Thursday, 27 November 2014Why do you write?
Because it’s magic – it turns the frog of life into a prince. (Or is it the other way round?) And it is, as Wilde once said of smoking, so exquisitely unsatisfying. Actually, the real reason I write is that talking, either aloud or on paper, is the only thing I’m good at.
Are you a vivid dr ...
Delia Falconer reviews 'What Days Are For' by Robert Dessaix
Robert Dessaix’s authorial voice reminds me of Christina Stead’s description of a small, clear wave running up a beach at low tide, playfully ‘ringing its air-bells’. He is not a writer of direct, declarative prose. Instead, Dessaix specialises in sentences that skip over and around their subjects, sometimes darting nimbly into brackets to investigate a seco ...