Robert Dessaix, author of such works as Twilight of Love: Travels with Turgenev and the novels Night Letters and Corfu, returns with a new work, Arabesques: A Tale Of Double Lives. As the book is due for release on October 1st, the author is interviewed in "The Sydney Morning Herald" by Helen Greenwood. He describes the book as:
"A conversation about travels and reveries", as he says in his introduction, might do. Less pithy but more accurate would be: "Travels with some friends in the footsteps of famous French author Andre Gide.""The publisher likes the word memoir," Dessaix says, "because sales and marketing know how to spell it. So they call it travel memoir and I suppose it is. [But] I'm really travelling in my head as much as through the world."
[snip]
Dessaix doesn't go on the road with Gide as a biographer or as the kind of cultural tourist who tracks down plaques on buildings. "I travel in order to experiment with who I am," says Dessaix, who lives in a large house near Hobart. As he moves around, from Portugal and France to Algeria and Morocco, he muses, questions and imagines. Love, eros, intimacy, friendship and marriage are in his sights - and he stalks his quarries like a man making a nature documentary about a rare and exquisite beast. Dessaix, like Christopher Isherwood, is the camera.
