[ilds] Corfu; the fascination continues

Sun Jan 3 05:39:08 PST 2010

Isn't it curious how reviews can talk about a 
different story (or leave out parts for one reason 
or another). The one I read on "Corfu" places the 
writer on is way home to Adelaide but in Italy 
living with an Italian lover who leaves him.. The 
writer goes to Corfu where he rents a house .... 
this part is the same.... The witer whilst being 
indiscrete discovers photos of and a letter from 
his italian lover addressed to his absent landlord 
and discovers that the lover is to come and live 
with the landlord...etc...

It was in French and Google refused to find it for 
me again....
BR
Marc

Denise Tart & David Green a écrit :
> Below some comments on Robert Dessaix's /Corfu/. Durrellians will 
> observe /some/ familiar themes.
> 
>  
> 
> '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 writer whose house he's living in. As he explores his 
> surroundings and makes new friends in Corfu, his own life begins to 
> appear to him like an illuminating shadow-play 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 friendship, 
> love, the ordinary and extraordinary. Yet 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.
> 
> 
>       Author Information
> 
> Robert Dessaix was the producer and presenter of ABC Radio National's 
> Books and Writing program from 1985 to 1995. Born in Sydney in 1944, he 
> studied Russian language and literature at the Australian National 
> University in Canberra, where he also taught for some twenty years until 
> joining the ABC. After joining the ABC he began to publish his own short 
> fiction and essays and in 1993 co-edited Picador New Writing . In 1994 
> he published to critical acclaim "A Mother's Disgrace", while his 
> bestselling first novel, "Night Letters" (1996) won the ABA Book of the 
> Year Award in 1996 and the Australian Literary Society Gold Medal in 
> 1997. This was followed by "Secrets", written with Drusilla Modjeska and 
> Amanda Lohrey, in 1997. "(and so forth)", a selection of Robert 
> Dessaix's short fiction, essays and journalism, was published in to rave 
> reviews and won the Foundation for Australian Literary Studies H.T. 
> Priestley medal (Best Book of the Year) in 1998. He lives in Tasmania.
> 
>     /Although this novel was inspired by the life of Australian writer
>     and actor, Kester Berwick, the Narrator is as fictional as the
>     characters he encounters./
> 
> This needs to be said at the start, for one might understandably, and 
> unwisely, take the narrator of /Corfu/ to be Robert Dessaix. He has 
> Dessaix's love of things Russian; he has something of Dessaix's 
> intelligence and his broad knowledge of literature; he speaks in the 
> first person about a man who actually lived from 1930 to 1992; he is 
> Australian and he is gay. The narrator's "voice," nowever, is not the 
> voice Dessaix's readers have come to know. And, initially, I must admit 
> that I didn't like it. It was only when I learned that the narrator was 
> an actor, that the camp tone, sly wit and catty comments fell into place 
> and I began to enjoy it.
> 
> Dessaix's narrator, who is never named, is on his way home to Adelaide 
> but, like Odysseus, he ends up on Corfu: "Greece, as we all know, is 
> full of foreigners who were once on their way home from somewhere and 
> got stranded there. They wash up on the beach while floating past, 
> disappointed by something or other..." The narrator is disappointed in 
> love. So, too was Kester Berwick, in whose house the narrator resides 
> for a couple of months. The house and its contents arouse his curiosity 
> about Kester and he does a bit of snooping. He reads Kester's letters 
> and books, looks at his personal photographs, and gets to know his 
> friends and neighbours, all of whom are suitably odd, even if only 
> because they choose to live as foreigners on a Greek island.
> 
> Art reflects life. And between Kester Berwick and the narrator there are 
> many parallels. Both are actors and writers; both are restless and away 
> from home; and both, it transpires, have some sort of ongoing 
> relationship with William, a young, cocky, feckless Australian, who is 
> like some figure from Ancient Greek poetry. But it is Chekhov more than 
> the Ancient Greeks who links this book together, although Homer, 
> Tolstoy, Sappho and Cavafy also play their parts.
> 
> Homer, Chekhov, Tolstoy, Sappho, Cavafy and Kester Berwick make unlikely 
> bedfellows but the common ground of their "literary landscapes" is to be 
> found in the narrator's musings. On /The Cherry Orchard/, for example, 
> which Chekhov calls "A Comedy in Three Acts":
> 
>     ...we read through Act III. Such a painful act - the stupid party
>     Renyevskaya throws while her estate is being auctioned off, while
>     she's losing everything she loves and ruining everyone, its an orgy
>     of humiliation and despair. And terribly funny, according to Clive
>     [the Director], an expert on all things Russian. "Remember its
>     vaudeville with feeling," he said to us as we were about to begin.
> 
> Chekhov, the narrator eventually concludes, is funny, and also entirely 
> relevant to life in North London and Corfu and elsewhere, because his 
> characters fill their lives with the trivia, just as we all do: "Any 
> fool, as Chekhov himself said somewhere, can deal with a crisis--it's 
> day-to-day living that wears us out."
> 
> Meandering around Corfu, Lesbos, London and Adelaide in some vivid 
> journeys, with some vivid encounters, the narrator ponders literature, 
> friendship and love, exile and home, and life in general.
> 
> I was entertained. And surprised, when I had finished, to realise that I 
> had just enjoyed what could well be classified as "gay fiction." But to 
> classify it as such would be as limiting as to describe it as "travel 
> writing," which is also possible. Like Jeanette Winterson, Dessaix deals 
> interestingly with ideas, art and literature.
> 
> Peter Craven, in a review of this book in the /Australian Book Review/ 
> (August 2001), praises Dessaix’s writing, generally, for its "wiriness 
> and intellectual intensity," and for the "integrity and purpose" which 
> he habitually displays "under all that lavender carry on." This is true. 
> I can't say I have ever noticed the "lavender carry on" before, but 
> there are certainly elements of it in /Corfu/, a book which Craven 
> dislikes and calls "maddenly campy," and purposeless. Yet, considering 
> all the narrator’s musing on purposelessness in Chekhov, this is perhaps 
> the whole point of the book.
> 
> In any case, /Corfu/ is a novel, and Dessaix is surely allowed to have 
> fun in his fiction writing, even if it does conflict with conservative 
> views of the way a "national treasure" (Craven's words) should behave. 
> Does it really matter if the journey is purposeless? The narrator’s 
> company is entertaining, his travels are exotic, and his adventures, 
> like those of Odysseus, are curiously full of strange encounters. It’s 
> definitely not gloomy enough for Chekhov, but Homer might well have been 
> amused.
> 
> David Green
> 16 William Street
> Marrickville NSW  2204
> +61 2 9564 6165
> 0412 707 625
> dtart at bigpond.net.au <mailto:dtart at bigpond.net.au>
> www.denisetart.com.au <http://www.denisetart.com.au>
> 
> 
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