Customer Reviews

Night Letters: A Novel

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Robert Dessaix's Night Letters is a poetic masterpiece. Not since Edmund White's richly evocative Nocturnes For the King of Naples has a gay novelist infused the themes of love and death with so fine a lyric sensibility.

On finding himself diagnosed HIV positive, the book's Australian protagonist sets off on a journey from Switzerland across Northern Italy to Venice. Finding in Venice the funereal counterpoint to his own meditations on mortality, he writes a series of letters home to a friend. It is within the inspired context of these letters that the novel develops its hypnotic narrative qualities.

If Night Letters is essentially composed of one man's nocturnal reflections on the nature of time, history and the search for an earthly paradise, then the nature of that exercise is dramatically underscored by other enriching narratives. When the protagonist makes the acquaintance at his hotel of the closeted Professor Eschenbaum, then we are introduced to the story of The Disappearing Courtesan. It is through the Professor that we learn the historic intrigue of Donna Scamozzi to have her virgin daughter Camilla married to a wealthy Venetian. Camilla's scheming liaisons lead eventually to a breathtakingly-paced tale of sordid sex and revenge. Gangbanged at the instigation of Lorenzo Cordellini for her infidelities, Camilla falls in love with his red-headed, blue-eyed son Alberto. Through the machinations of a magician Camilla contrives to bring father and son into murderous conflict. Lorenzo mistakenly knifes his son, who is in drag, and as a consequence of her grief for Alberto, Camilla is never seen or heard of again. She has dematerialized.

Much of the novel's beauty comes from the author's profound reflections on Dante's Divine Comedy, and his linking the protagonist's experiential journey to that of Dante's passage from the Inferno to the Paradiso. Dante's perception of God as a radiant point in the universe, proves a pivot on which the troubled Australian can endeavour to find rest. 'The idea of Point,' he writes, 'and the relationship between a point and straight lines and circles, is one I must contemplate more, instead of thinking constantly about lunch, train timetables and the havoc in my veins.'

Nocturnal dialogue between our protagonist and the erudite Professor Eschenbaum, leads to the additional consideration of time as it is observed in the lives of two famous Venetians: Marco Polo and Casanova. Siding with Casanova on account of his intense magnification of the moment, something to be vitally lived by those diagnosed positive, the narrator tells us: 'Polo discovered paradise over there, you see, he travelled there and then came back. Casanova discovered paradise in the travelling, if you see what I mean - it wasn't somewhere you could come back from.'

Far from being morbid, Night Letters offers a message of hope. It is by living now and in the immediate that life is most purposefully experienced. The narrator who is constantly alert to celebrating the beauty and colours of the Italian landscape is not a person evaluating his life in retrospect, but rather someone intent on engaging with the present and biting it in the way we would a ripe peach or plum.

The outcome is heroic. Dessaix has written a novel in which poetic and philosophic reflection are compounded into brilliant narrative. Illness is viewed as contingent on the will to live, and the future as it is apprehended by the narrator is open-ended and continuous.

Jeremy Reed

Bruno bettelheim tells of an Indian tradition in which the sick go to a story teller who examines the patient and then recites a story designed to work a cure. It's a challenging thought but it is obvious that some stories have the power to heal. This is a book about powerful stories, powerful places and the healing they bring.

The framework of this picareque novel is familiar enough: the writer flees from his homeland under sentence of death. [He has the AIDS virus.] He goes to Switzerland and Italy in denial and there follows a path rich in stories and allusions. If you don't know your Dante and your Thomas Mann you will miss some of the richness but even the most general reader will connect with the narrative jewells the writer encounters. There are obvious connections with the "Death in Venice" motif: same place, different plague. Other stories are spun out of the place or the people he meets. Finally, sated and strengthened, he turns home empowered and prepared to face death.

This is an Australian novel despite its European setting. Non Australian readers will be charmed by the wit and the sensitivity to the sound of narrator's voice. [It is a very aural novel.] If Robert Dessaix can write more novels like Night Letters he may become our premier writer for the next century.

I just picked this book up at the library knowing nothing about it. By the time I finished it I had dog-earred so may pages that I decided to report the book lost. I happily paid for it so that I can return to the pages I loved best.

I am not gay and probably would not have read the book if I had thought it was about gay issues. I found Dessaix's thoughts and observations to be similar to my own, as I consider myself to be a sensualist. For those of us who want to examine our lives rather than escape to outerspace this is a worthwhile read.

I think it is signifigant that this treasure has so few reviews. I just check reviews on "Spending" by Mary Gordon, which is a terrible bore and the readers were just raving. Not many intelligent or thinking readers of fiction out there.

I discovered "Night Letters" at a booksale in a local public library. I hadn't heard of it at all. What struck me, and got me to pick it up to examine it, was the shere beauty of the bound book and its cover. The beauty of the language kept me enthralled. The literary allusions, including references to Patricia Highsmith and her novel recently made into the film "The Talented Mr. Ripley", caught my attention since I had recently seen the film with its lush, gorgeous Venetian scenery. Fascinating also were the descriptions of the Italian and Swiss Alps--making the journey not only introspective, but also great travel,arm-chair style. I recommend it to anyone who seeks excellence in writing.

A simply extraordinary...... novel? memoir? what? Or does it really not matter? Night Letters is one of the most profound and moving experiences I've come across in modern literature from a guy who REALLY knows how to write.

A unique cocktail of travelogue, relection and introspection, mixed with a couple of fabbo little fables, this book will really take you by surprise. Seemingly disjointed throughout most of it, the last paragraph carries it all. This is the perfect example of a book where the whole is far more than the sum of its parts.

A fable of my own: I was due to meet friends at a (gay) club at midnight one Saturday. I love my friends a lot, but I finished this in the bath at 10.30pm and reached straight for the phone to cancel: nothing against them, but anything they said to me that night would have been totally banal after Dessaix. I've rarely been so moved.

"I felt like a scaly bag of filth about to split and spill all over the pavement. I thought they must be able to sniff me rotting. I felt like an affront to them, and wondered why they didn't ask to have me removed. They were all going somewhere, you see, and that's what I couldn't bear to face." Ever heard an writer talk about himself with such searing honesty? Just keep reading. There's no doubt in my mind - this is one of the most significant contributions to the literature of AIDS that the world has seen so far.

Funny, sad, fascinating, tangential, curious - this book defies desrciption, but definitely (DEFINITELY!) warrants reading, by everyone. After all, we all end up in the same place, don't we? Give it to your friends, your family, your neighbours, your colleagues.

I hope Dessaix lives forever. I know - for me at least - his work will.

What the previous reviews of this remarkably enduring novel show is the difficulty readers encounter when they try to assign the book to a specific genre. While it has, as Dessaix makes such self-conscious reference to in the opening pages, elements of Laurence Sterne's A Sentimental Journey, the novel itself is more than the experiences of a man undertaking the grand tour --literally throughout Europe and literally toward death, like Sterne himself. It is a work in which identity, the role and function of binary oppositions (the critical element that had so fascinated Dessaix in both A Mother's Disgrace and his two later works, And so forth and Corfu), the role of narrative in the construction and deconstruction of self and, of course, the meditation upon mortality. It is here that a second grand narrative is invoked because, like Sterne's A Sentimental Journey, Dante's Divine Comedy essentially is the narrative structuring of the greatest binary opposition of all for the human mind: life and death, Heaven and Hell. Or, as it was once referred to, The Four Last Things, each of which forms a neat binary opposition that fits both Dessaix's elegiac mood and Dante's meditation upon free will: death, judgement, Heaven and Hell.

This is a novel that is as much masquerade as it is conveyor of metaphoric truth. It is a highly wrought and self-conscious work in which a character we come to discover is called Robert writes, apparently, letters to his lover in Australia as he journeys throughout Switzerland and Italy in search of the two elusive elements of the story: `equipoise' and `balance'. So, what is a novel, a work of fiction, filled with all the necessary fictional licences traditionally given to writers, becomes a fiction based on an apparent fact, with actual letters that have been judiciously edited for the reader; these letters then begin to constitute a diary, a diary in which impressions, longings, the search for peace dictate the structure of the meditations; this diary then transforms itself into a self-conscious literary meditation upon Dante, Patricia Highsmith, Turgenev, Sterne and the stories of Cassanova, Marco Polo and Antoinetta, the Baroness de St Léger. Problematically, for the reader at least, none of these stories is quite what they appear to be: Dante's is the tale of a `paranoid obsessive', Highsmith's `flatness' shows us not death but guilt, Turgenev shows us the night side of life, Sterne's travels are really expressions of longing and belonging, while the tales of Cassanova, Marco Polo and the Baroness (and even the Disappearing Courtesan) are not tales of derring-do or hopeless romanticism but the same yearnings for freedom that finally destroyed Monte Verità. In short, nothing is what it first seems to be. Even the fussy, overly pedantic and sometimes carping editor, Igor Miazmov (whose patronymic, incidentally, is the Russian word for a `miasma') is fictitious. The `R.' of the narrative is not Robert Dessaix but a fictional character, while the seemingly real editor is only real in so far as he is the fictional disguise of Dessaix himself.

In short, this is the nature of post-structuralist narrative: it takes the elements of traditional narrative genres, manipulates them, confuses them, blends them until the result is a hybrid fiction that is as elusive as the flash of gold seen in a Japanese pool as the carp swims away from you. The author has become the self-conscious subject of his own fiction, as well as being its own critic; in short, this is the fiction of writer as subject while simultaneously being writer as author. This, then, allows Dessaix to explore one of the other powerful metaphors in his work, the journey; certainly, the journey is among the most ancient of literary metaphors, having been explored at length in The Odyssey, The Aeneid, The Pilgrim's Progress, Paradise Lost and Paradise Regain'd as well in The Divine Comedy, among others. But Dessaix's question is more subtle than simply asking, What happens when one's journey ends? Here, the question becomes, What journey does one take when the meaning assigned to one's life is so radically altered, so fundamentally transformed `so that even when you're drinking in the abundant beauty, you feel a pang not unlike grief' and the shadow of loss, grief, `illness as the night-side of life' comes to dominate one's every awareness? It is the answer to this provocative question, this demand that the writer (and, by the way, the reader) confront his mortality and fashion from it a self-awareness and capacity to craft his own journey as a metaphor of life, that creates this sometimes illusory narrative, Night Letters.

The title itself is provocative in its suggestions. Literary history is rich with references to the night and, usually, such references connote danger, threat or death. For centuries the canticle recited in the Third Nocturn of the Office of the Dead has come from Isaiah 38: 10: Ego dixi: In dimidio dierum meorum vadam ad portas inferi frustratus residuo annorum meorum. It is a sombre meditation on the end of life, the place of death and our need to resign ourselves to life's inevitable close: `I said, in the noontide of my days, I must go to the gates of Sheol: I am deprived of the residue of my years'. It is a reminder that darkness is inseparable in the consciousness of man from the reality of death, the closure of life and the loss of light. So, in choosing the title Night Letters, Dessaix explicitly invokes in our minds this meditation upon death but with a significant shift in emphasis: these are letters, they are the intimate communication between human beings and while they are meditations upon the inevitable end we all face and, in R's case, one that conjures up dreams of `banging around in a forest of hanged corpses', they are a creative response to the options that remain open to us before we reach the `noontide of [our] days'. In this respect, their creativity is an affirmation of life, a literary statement that `in the midst of life we are in death' but that, in typically post-structuralist fashion, life remains, unyielding and beckoning. Thus the idea of darkness moves from being a threat to becoming an opportunity for meditation, a means of discovering the balance between Professor Eschenbaum's intellectualised sexual brutality, the Baroness's `circle of desire and disappointment', Patricia Highsmith's `mellow disconnectedness' and Dante's Mount of Purgatory, for ever facing Heaven but for ever forbidden its blessed promise. Through these meditations on life, art, literature, fornication and geographical serendipities such as the Herb Garden on the Isola Grande, or the St Gotthard Pass and the Italian border, where `civilisation seems tempered by Eros and Eros in turn is tautened and braced by contact with the Northern enemy', we are led, finally, `to be part of that exultation' that brings the novel to its conclusion. Simply, life must continue, no matter the uncertainties, the failings, the pains, the weaknesses, the fallibilities that threaten to destroy us. This understanding, only this understanding, is the fruit of nocturnal meditation and communicated only through `night' letters that allow the still, inner voice to speak. With yet another layer of irony, R's writing at night is also a means of protecting himself against the `solitude'--or is it the `isolation and loneliness'?--of the coming night, thereby linking R, Miazmov and Dessaix by the thread of mortality and our shared fear of the dark where, still we fear that `any passing phantom can sink its teeth into your throat' (p.31).

Another significant feature of this novel is its literary use of narrative disjunction, a disjunction that is both temporal, literary as well as weaving together the linear narrative with a non-linear, emotively structured narrative. While the letters are chronologically sequential and move us from one day to the next over the course of twenty `nights', or letters, they evoke the literary ghost of Scherherazade, who tells tales to King Sharyar over 1001 nights in order to avoid execution. In this sense, the letters are something of a literary postponement of death, a literary entertainment designed to forestall the break of morning and the execution it must bring with it. Yet while this chronological narrative layer is, in itself, an inescapable element of the novel, it is in some ways its least important feature. Importantly, R's meandering journeys to the St Gotthard Pass, to the Isola Grande, to Venice, his train journeys through the darkness and the zig-zagging that evokes both A Sentimental Journey and Sterne's other picaresque novel, the eccentric Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, defy such narrative logic. They are, instead, operating with a logic that is intuitive, one that brings R to his most important realisation in the novel: `It's not the number of things, surely, but the quality. It's the subtlety of your vision that casts a spell on time, not the number of things you see. That's the direction the needle on my compass points to' (p.197). This, then, as Dessaix's metaphor of the compass evokes, is about direction. Not linear direction, not compass direction in its true sense, but the direction taken by the soul, by our sense of longing, which gives us `the subtlety of...vision that casts a spell on time'. This is the real lesson, the one R has been moving toward through the tales of Marco Polo, Cassanova, the tragic figure of the Baroness and the Disappearing Courtesan. Each tale draws us a little back, or a little forward in time; each tale becomes `a spell on time' that allows R to understand `the direction the needle on my compass points to'. This journey leads R to St Anthony of Padua in the Padua letters where, significantly, he weeps from `disenchantment' as his erratic search leads him to a saint who is reduced to `finding lost pen-knives and golf-balls' from being the Hammer of Heretics and it `all smacks of something I deeply dislike' (p. 234). Our constant focus on Italy, the erratic nature of the journeys themselves is about reaching that understanding of the `direction the needle on my compass points to' in its subjective, non-linear way. As R tells us while in Padua, `These days I try hard to make things worthwhile for what they are now, without considering what they may lead to or whether what I've been experiencing can be recaptured'(p.240). It is after this point of disaffection with St Anthony of Padua, with his violent contradictions, that R reaches a second key narrative and metaphoric point in the story's narrative, which is an understanding of the ways of travelling that Cassanova, Marco Polo and Sterne represent. They are not mutually exclusive ways of seeing the world but ones upon which R may draw as and when he needs, or chooses, to do so: it is suffused with eroticism, as R sees Sterne's to have been, with its Enlightenment (and very modern, if we consider what leads R to Italy in the first place) dangers and temptations, Cassanova's sensual bid for freedom through immersion in each moment, or Polo's prosaic journeys for mercantile profit. Like Cassanova, R pursues a narrative and emotional journey that may lead him to `a secret knowledge...which would reveal quite a different meaning behind everyday functions and events' (p. 249).

This leads us back to the opening paragraph of the story, with it surprising and gaudy Freudian image:
Streaking through the jungle on a gaudy leopard, cape billowing out behind me as if I were aflame, I have on my head (my greying pate) - and this is vital - a hat, a black, gargantuan fedora with a drooping brim, and streaming from one side of it is a cassowary feather (of all things). A flash of red and blue - and I am gone! Should I explain? Perhaps I should, because of all the things I want to tell you, why I'm now astride a leopard is, to me at least, the most important (p. 3).
It is an extraordinary and contradictory image: the leopard is described as `gaudy' while it is the rider himself who has his `cape billowing out behind me...a...gargantuan fedora...and...a cassowary feather...'. This reversal of apparent meaning points the reader towards the narrative complexities discussed earlier, while articulating the emotional sense by which R orders his world as he begins and, later, continues his journey. It is also important to note the change in symbolic meaning of this image at the conclusion of the novel. Initially, the leopard captures the idea of headlong, uncontrolled flight, with the rider's vitality streaming out of him in the form of the billowing red cape and the `gargantuan fedora' masks his identity and is dominated by the ghostly blue of the cassowary feather. It is a striking image of flight, of a loss of control as the leopard impels the character onward without any sense of this ridiculous figure exercising any control. It is, in this respect, a symbolic dream image of R's life with his newly diagnosed terminal illness. As we read R's letters, we follow his journey on the leopard's back and come to realise that R's erratic journey is as much the leopard's--his instinctual drive, as it were--as it is any imitation of Sterne's eccentric peregrinations. By the conclusion of the novel, the fear embodied in the leopard and which carries R is recalled as being `a lion or a leopard padding along behind me, tensed to pounce', with R having only two choices available to him: `bravely facing the lion (and letting it tear me to pieces) and keeping on running'. What we encounter in the opening of the novel is not, in fact, the beginning of the dream at all but its conclusion: `I neither faced the lion nor kept on running--I leapt onto its back, stuck a hat on my head and rode off on it...with my heart in my mouth, but also with true exultation' (pp. 271-272). The image that opens the novel is the conclusion of the dream, a celebration of choice, of control, rather than its opposite. Again, Dessaix disjoins the narrative sequence of R's dream to generate a level of surrealist symbolism that is multivalent as well as seemingly contradictory. As with art, the meaning of life may alter from moment to moment, depending on the view we take of what we are looking at and the care with which we explore it. Thus, the moment of fear and loss of control is transformed magically into one of celebration, which retains a full awareness of the dangers and risks inherent in this new direction. It is a celebration of vitality in its purest sense, of living from moment to moment; it is the surrealist rendering of what R tells his correspondent toward the end of the story: `These days I try hard to make things worthwhile for what they are now, without considering what they may lead to or whether what I've been experiencing can be recaptured' (p.240). The dream is the celebration of this more cerebral articulation of the need to live in each moment fully but without the need to `seize' and control each aspect of personal experience. It is the personal balance R has sought, the `voiding of the self, the submission to The Way, both Being and Doing quite out of your hands' (p. 15) referred to following the annunciation of his `Chinese Gabriel'.

Of course, the `annunciation' that commences this search for freedom, for personal meaning, is significant both for its use as the narrative frame of the novel and for the pseudo-religious symbolism employed to explore R's most traumatic personal moment. For the Virgin Mary, the moment of the Annunciation, the arrival of the Archangel Gabriel to tell her that she shall bear the Messiah in her womb (qv. Luke 1:26-38), is one of momentous change and confusion. In the same vein, the doctor who delivers to R the news of his illness is a harbinger of `great import', whose message will for ever change of the course of the recipient's life--altering its shape, purpose and meaning--just as the Archangel Gabriel's did for the Virgin Mary. R's description of the doctor as his `Chinese Gabriel' is more than simply a literary metaphor; it goes right to the heart of the novel's exploration of ways of seeing the world, of the `subtlety of...vision' that enables us to cast `a spell on time' and, like Cassanova, or the romanticised version of Marco Polo, to discover `a secret knowledge...which would reveal quite a different meaning behind everyday functions and events'. It is significant that R turns immediately to art to offer meaning to the news delivered to him by his `Gabriel'. It offers a way of mediating experience, of offering a mirror to life and the sometimes uncontrollable events its sweeps us up in. This, too, goes to the heart of Dessaix's quasi-fictional meditation upon existence. In the persona of the `Chinese Gabriel', the doctor no longer simply delivers the news of a terminal illness but news of a different way in which the world must be viewed, of a new understanding of self that must be attained; like the Virgin Mary's, this journey is not without its rigours, or even its dangers and it may, like Mary's, only end at the foot of the cross, but the journey itself will have profoundly altered the traveller's understanding of life and the nature and purpose of existence. The iconic paintings of the Annunciation invoked by R, Fra Angelico's in particular, evoke the colour, the mystery, the moment of balance in which the divine meets the human. Of course, R is not beyond making a rather ironic and self-deprecating literary joke of this when he juxtaposes the Virgin's statement quoniam virum non cognosco--`Because I know not a man'--with his own real confession of his `sins' of the flesh. What this moment of realization does show us is that R, as a character, carries a deep awareness of himself that prevents him from seeking a shallow solace in sorrow, or self-pity. There is a robust awareness, like the Virgin's, that means he, too, must accept his fate and say to his `Gabriel' fiat mihi secundum verbum tuum--`Be it done to me according to thy word'.

What each of these images invokes is a particular moment of seeing, a way of receiving such momentous news ranging from Ghirlandaio's nervous Virgin who appears to push away the angel, to Fra Angelico's meekly submissive `handmaiden of the Lord', to van Eyck's regally clad Virgin who receives the angel's greeting in pious dismay, to da Vinci's piously learned Virgin, who receives the news from the hands of the angel and who, it seems, confirms her role in the divine plan. Each portrayal offers R a lens through which he may view his own experience and a way of mediating his response to that news. From the outset, it becomes clear, art is positioned as the means of developing the `subtlety of...vision' required to understand life in all of its moments, from the tragic, as the opening of the story shows us, to the ridiculous, as we see with Professor Eschenbaum's mugging and, then, to the fleeting moments of the sublime on the Isola Grande, or `the illuminating experience in St Anthony's Basilica' in Padua, which is as much a mundane revelation as it is spiritual.

It all moves R to the point where he can finally write `I've quite decided to move on', not merely in a physical sense but in a psychological and emotional way as well as he picks up on the `little signals' that tell him the world awaits his return. In this sense, this is a story about the journey out as much as it is about the journey that leads to return; it is about the importance of the `green world' to the process of bringing order and meaning to our lives and the way in which art may most readily supply that `green world' for us to inhabit until we are ready to return.

Coincidentally, I finished reading Harold Broadkey's__Profane Friendship__only a few months before I picked up__Night Letters__. I now know more about Venice than I ever wanted.

__Night Letters__ reads far too much like a travelogue for my taste. Dessaix sets up a narrative triangle between a) extended, poetic, ornate detail of Venice and his other travel spots; b) some heart-wrenching expressions of his own struggle with newly realized mortality; and c) fun old-world type tales of love, betrayal and histrionics. I am tempted to think that he wanted the actual travelogue/architecture/geography aspect to be indespensible to the rest of the story (Broadkey did this very successfully in__Profane Friendship__), but for me, in__Night Letters__, it was gratuitous and destracting. Think about it: pondering your impending corporeal collapse in delapidated old Venice -- maybe a little obvious?

If you find yourself with this book, linger on the personal and historical narrative and skim the rest.

A novel about a journey that begins when the narrator discovers his HIV status. Thereafter, he journeys into the legends and narrations of Venice and Padua, suffucing the landscape with myth, legend, stories and passion. But in all that, he leaves out any exploration of his own sexual urges and promptings (erlaier referred to as 'adventures he wouldn't have been without'. His identity is purely that of journey-man. It is as if being HIV pos. ends sexuality and draws it into a dark room of past memories only, leaving the present/future blank. This isn't a gay novel, but the narrator is gay in a wholly vacant way. The perfum eof the stories suffocates the individuality of the author, and it is the author/narrator that is the shared point between reader and the contextas of the journey.