Night Letters: A Journey Through Switzerland and Italy

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Summary: The power of story and place
Review: 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.

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Summary: Venice replaces the narrator as the sensualist
Review: 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.

Rating:
Summary: Beauty and the Book
Review: 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.

Rating:
Summary: Beauty and the Book
Review: 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.

Rating:
Summary: Death, Beauty and Venice
Review: 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