1 week Ago
In an interview with The Paris Review, novelist Don DeLillo said, "I'm completely willing to let language press meaning upon me". That's not to say the sound of a sentence should be given priority over its meaning, but that meaning finds its full expression – is discovered – in the aesthetically elegant or stylistically forceful sentence. This is the feeling one gets reading Robert Dessaix, the 81-year-old Australian novelist, essayist, journalist and memoirist.
In his latest book Chameleon, a memoir, Dessaix's dexterous use of language moves him to insight, self-reflection and remembering. Review: Chameleon: A Memoir of Art, Travel, Ideas and Love – Robert Dessaix (Text Publishing) Dessaix writes in the book about his youth, his homosexuality, his adoption, sex, love, travel, art, literature, language, death and faith. There is an approximate chronology, but the book is largely arranged by a mind at play.
Dessaix makes use of the strange plasticity of recollection and the flexible possibilities of essayistic writing to happily tolerate ambiguity and contradiction. Chameleon unspools as memory does: as an ongoing negotiation with the self. It is easy to analogise memory to the process of watching a home video or leafing through a book of photographs (or perhaps, now, scrolling through a digital archive of images and videos).
But Dessaix understands memory as a kind of swooping, erratic reverie. He draws connections across decades, tracing the people and places who recur or recede. Their significance is allocated in retrospect.
As a life takes shape, becoming describable and narrativised, the past shimmers and reshapes itself as we try to lock it down. Dessaix accounts for this perpetual uncertainty by parcelling himself out and staging a series of internal conversations. Reflecting on the long-ago breakdown of his marriage, he writes: "I never had any mates, although I had a few male friends.
(Didn't I? Didn't you? We must have.)" This is typical of..
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