Latest news with #Dessaix
The Guardian
07-03-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
‘Taut', ‘extraordinary delight', ‘absolutely bonkers': the best Australian books out in March
Fiction, Ultimo, $34.99 Diana Reid's breakout debut, Love and Virtue, tapped the millennial zeitgeist from all angles: a campus novel exploring class, power and rape culture. Her fast follow-up, Seeing Other People, dealt in similar grey areas, starring two sisters in their 20s, both drawn to the same women. Signs of Damage is something of a departure: a thriller set in Europe across two time periods, as a family reckons with unknown trauma. It starts in 2008 in the south of France, where the Kelly family are holidaying when 13-year-old Cass goes missing. Something happens to her, but we don't know what. Sixteen years later, in Europe again for a friend's wedding, Cass is on a balcony when someone else tumbles off and dies – but she can't remember anything at all. The writing is taut, the mysteries abundant, and the trauma plot deftly handled and subtly subverted, in a book whose pages turn themselves. – Steph Harmon Fiction, Text, $36.99 Memoir and nonfiction writer Robert Dessaix offers a window into his life in his new book, Chameleon. The author of Twilight of Love, A Mother's Disgrace and Night Letters, Dessaix writes with beauty, wit and infectious energy about his early experiences, particularly in Morocco, where he discovered and uncovered his homosexual masculinity. Chameleon is an education on the role travel and literature can have in shaping our identities and imaginations; Dessaix delves into his long life to tease out the key moments, and books, that have made him the man and the writer that he is. – Joseph Cummins Fiction, Ultimo, $34.99 Madeleine Watts' stunning second novel is about a young couple who go on a road trip through the American south-west, as the calamitous California wildfires rage across it. She's there as an academic obsessively researching the Colorado River: colonised, diverted and destroyed. He's there in his capacity at a land art organisation, surveying giant works as they take (or remove) shape across the desert. (The thrill of a novelist who can invent conceptual art you actually want to look at!) Those who have road-tripped in America will be delighted to revisit some of these spots, rendered here vividly and with love. But as the climate crisis clouds their windscreen, grief ruptures the pair's relationship – and a mysterious, unfathomable loss unfolds in the rear view. – SH Fiction, Ultimo, $34.99 The Theory of Everything is a frustrating, extraordinary delight. Frustrating because of how resolutely it defies convention: a short story told in fragments might make way for a poem, or a list, or a manifesto. There's no 'easy' narrative to settle into here; the story itself is elusive, seemingly one thing before becoming another. That's why it's extraordinary too. Yumna Kassab, author of The Lovers and Politica, makes the reader work hard for the rewards. They're to be found in the book's form – experimental in the truest, most liberating sense – and in its incisive interrogation of the central themes (power, race, gender, wealth, freedom) delivered as sharp little punches to the gut. Kassab has written fireworks into these pages. – Bec Kavanagh Cookbook, Hardie Grant, $60 When Melbourne chef Helly Raichura opened a restaurant inside her home in 2018, she named it Enter Via Laundry. Diners did precisely that, before sitting down to eat regional Indian dishes like the ones she'd known growing up in India.. Raichura has now poured her knowledge of India's long culinary history into a beautiful tome of 68 recipes structured into key historical periods, starting with pre-Vedic (before 1500BC). They include a cheat's guide to ghee, recipes for lentil fritters and samosa warqi (pastries stuffed with smoked lamb) and Enter Via Laundry's ever-popular khandavi (ribbons of chickpea flour in coconut sauce). – Emma Joyce Nonfiction, HarperCollins, $35.99 Full disclosure: Alyx Gorman is Guardian Australia's lifestyle editor. But we must shout out this impressive work of journalism, which saw Gorman interview more than 130 people to explore 'the orgasm gap': the discrepancy between how often straight women orgasm during sex when compared with straight men. In Australia, the orgasm gap sits at about 26% for straight women – far higher than women who have sex with women, and men who have sex with men. So why is this? Gorman not only interviews regular people about their sex lives, but also sex workers, sex therapists, scientists and academics, to unpick why straight women can be unsatisfied by the sex they're having – and what men can do to improve things. Men, buy this book. – Sian Cain Fiction, UQP, $32.99 When Steve MinOn won the emerging category at the 2023 Queensland Literary awards, judges praised his manuscript for 'offering a fresh cultural perspective and challenging conventional notions of our national literature'. That's all well and good but it sort of glides over the absolutely bonkers main character: a dead man named Stephen Bolin (an anglicised almagamation of two Chinese first names, inspired by MinOn's own second name), who escapes from the morgue to walk his decomposing body to Far North Queensland, the town of his birth. Accompanying these gruesome and occasionally very funny passages is the story of where Bolin came from: four generations of migrant families – from China to Scotland to the UK to Australia – brought to life in a truely original debut. – SH Fiction, Penguin, $36.99 Few authors would admit to using a ghost writer. But portrait artist Vincent Fantauzzo has been open about enlisting Craig Henderson for his memoir, and with good reason: Fantauzzo is dyslexic, so he told his life story to Henderson in a series of difficult, emotional phone calls. And what a story it is. Unveiled tracks Fantauzzo's life, from growing up with an abusive father in Melbourne's public housing system through to his current glittering career as one of Australia's most commercially successful artists. It's an underdog success story you can't help but root for, and a peer behind the curtain at Fantauzzo's most famous works – like the haunting portrait of Heath Ledger he completed one day before the actor's death. – Katie Cunningham
The Guardian
27-02-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Chameleon by Robert Dessaix review – a dazzlingly beautiful mix of sex, travel and intimacy
One of Australia's finest writers of memoir and nonfiction, Robert Dessaix, returns with another journey into his past. His writing is highly regarded, particularly 2005's Twilight of Love: Travels with Turgenev, and this new book, Chameleon, is a similarly artful mix of biography and travelogue: a dazzlingly beautiful reading experience, tightly focused on sexuality and travel. Dessaix writes with a fun, free-wheeling, excited energy and it's infectious. 'Even today, at 80,' he writes, 'I sense a failure on my part to see life as an endeavour rather than a frolic, an endless outing with friends'. He threads together memories from across a long life – he was born in Sydney in 1944, and currently lives in Hobart with his partner, Peter Timms – while always remaining rooted in the present. At the core of this work is the question of what it is to be an authentic, real man: 'At every point in my life, what passersby would see, if they cared to stop and take a look, was some sort of shadow play about being a man: a sensitive man in particular, a man with feelings. Behind the screen the puppets were up to all sorts of tricks.' The motif of puppets returns again and again: a rich concept for Dessaix that speaks to his conception of how we perform our identities, 'this pantomime of masculinity … Even this morning, when I popped into the grocer's, the show, I noticed, was still running. I have never been the man I seemed to be.' Sign up for the fun stuff with our rundown of must-reads, pop culture and tips for the weekend, every Saturday morning From his position, late in his life, Dessaix does not bemoan this performance – as he writes: 'I don't suppose anyone ends up exactly as he or she hoped to be.' In musing on this question, Dessaix examines characters as diverse as Lawrence of Arabia, John Cheever and Aldo Busi, as well as a range of books and fictional characters like Andre Gide's The Immoralist, Richard Ford's Frank Bascombe (from The Sportswriter) and James Joyce's Leopold Bloom (from Ulysses). It was illuminating to read about the impact of fiction – both writers and their words – on a life. It's something we often see in memoirs, of course, but Dessaix's way of looping around and around his literary and fictional heroes sheds so much light, both on these figures and on Dessaix himself. For Dessaix, visiting Morocco in the early 1960s for the first time was a life-changing event. 'What did happen in Morocco […] – without fanfare, not in a rush – was this: something in me began to shrink into the shadows while something else was sparking into life in the light. Shyly, I turned to face it. This was the real start of a gentle, sweet debauchery, I suppose.' This 'slow turning' is into a full recognition of his self: his masculinity and his sexuality. Dessaix's writing has its greatest depth and richness when he talks about homosexual sex in the Arab world. He is ebullient on the impact of experiences, of all kinds of intimacy, in places like Morocco or Tunisia (particularly Morocco: 'Skin me and that's what you will see: Morocco.'). He never writes explicitly about the kinds of sexual encounters he has; it's more about the sort of permission and acceptance he finds in those places. Describing a huge swath of territory, 'a burnt-yellow belt that stretches (in my head) from Morocco to India and then, these days, a whole lifetime later, down into the pullulating green of Java and Sulawesi', Dessaix writes: 'What is liberating about the attitude to sex in this zone is that you may take pleasure in sexual intimacy without feeling any need to change your identity.' Despite describing an experience that contradicts our present understanding of restrictions on homosexuality in the Arab world, this distance between sex and identity is what Dessaix finds so attractive and informs how he wants to live his life. Sign up to Saved for Later Catch up on the fun stuff with Guardian Australia's culture and lifestyle rundown of pop culture, trends and tips after newsletter promotion Dessaix proclaims that he wants these sexual partners to be his 'brothers'. To him, it's not an exploitative relationship; he mentions Edward Said's concept of 'orientalism', but thinks it irrelevant, despite clearly describing a privileged touristic experience. He always has the ability to escape – as a visitor, one can come and go as one pleases. Having the mobility of being able to head for the deserts of north Africa 'whenever my own life is killing me' did make me feel uneasy about the power dynamics Dessaix describes, despite how liberating they were for him. But it's the humour and energy of his writing style that most propelled me through these pages. At times it's pure whimsy: 'Even at 10 I knew hair made promises,' he writes of a boyhood crush. He can evoke past crushes with a rare poignancy: 'Getting these letters from Ahmed was oddly like smoking: I was always pining for the next one, often thinking of little else, yet each letter, to be absolutely honest, was a faint – wispily faint – disappointment.' His writing is sophisticated and funny, and Chameleon is a rich and entertaining education on a man's life; a detailed map of the literature, ideas, and places that shaped him. Chameleon by Robert Dessaix is published by Text Publishing
