Night Letters: A Novel (Paperback)

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Editorial Reviews

From Kirkus Reviews

A literary Australian's affliction with HIV and his decision to spend some of his remaining time in Europe are merely the pretexts for this surprisingly engrossing collection of epistolary reflections on the meaning of life, love, and time--a bestseller in Australia that deserves to find an appreciative audience here. ``Midway along the journey of our life/I woke to find myself in a dark wood,'' this book begins, quoting from Dante's Inferno (a work to which the author frequently refers throughout the text). The words aptly describe the situation in which Dessaix's anonymous protagonist finds himself, having learned that he carries the HIV virus and can quite likely look forward to a slow, agonizing death. Loathe to disrupt his quiet life (he's a writer in Melbourne) by committing himself to fight the disease, unwilling to putter along pretending it doesn't exist, he decides to drift wherever chance takes him for a while in an effort to learn to experience his remaining moments as fully as he can. In these letters home, written in a Venice hotel room over the course of 20 days, our hero details his often mundane traveling adventures through Locarno, Vicenza, and Padua; details his intriguing conversations with a mysterious German professor staying at the hotel; meditates on the innate meaning and emotional significance of the cathedrals, museums, and venerable alleyways he frequents; and makes use of numerous entertaining discourses on the history of Venice, the nature of Venetians, the differences in philosophy and style between Marco Polo and Casanova, etc., as springboards for pondering the fate which awaits him--and all of us as well. Seductive, charming, and always thought-provoking. Despite this hero's unhappy prospects, he and his creator (a literary journalist and author of an Australian-published autobiography, A Mother's Disgrace) prove the best of traveling companions, whatever your journey happens to be. -- Copyright ©1997, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Review

This pocket-size book, dense with allusions to literary travelers like Dante, Casanova and Sterne, drove the Hollywood-bound Horse Whisperer from atop the Australian bestseller list. That's a testament to the popularity of its author, a book commentator on television and radio, and to the wry, chatty, surprisingly cheerful voice in which he discourses on heaven and hell, seduction and sex.... his central insight, if hardly original, is hard won and moving: that life may be lived best as a voyage, not to get somewhere or to accumulate experiences but to savor each moment. -- The New York Times Book Review, Patrick Farrell --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 288 pages
• Publisher: Picador; 1st edition (January 15, 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0312199392
• ISBN-13: 978-0312199395
• Product Dimensions: 7.5 x 4.6 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8.8 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (8 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #1,063,581 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Death, Beauty and Venice, December 11, 2001

By	Jeremy Reed (London, NW3) - See all my reviews

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

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The power of story and place, September 19, 1999

By	[e-mail] (Queensland Australia) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Night Letters: A Journey Through Switzerland and Italy (Hardcover)

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.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Sensuous and relevant, May 4, 1999

By A Customer

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.