Arabesques by Robert Dessaix: book review

Arabesques: A Tale of Double Lives (2008) by Australian author, Robert Dessaix, is a literary travelogue.

The starting point is the prolific French author, Andre Gide (1869-1951), who died when Dessaix was seven years old, just after he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1947. Gide was regarded as one of the twentieth century’s greatest writers and thinkers.

Following the tracks of Gide, from Portugal, France, Algiers, and Morocco to Italy, Dessaix explores the writer’s influences on his literary works—such as If it Die, Fruits of the Earth, The Vatican Cellars, The Immoralist, The Counterfeiters, and his later works, So Be It and Strait is the Gate—from an introspective analysis. Though there is no “real connection” between Dessaix and Gide, the author wanted to explore Gide’s “moral courage” and “openness about who he was and what he believed” from religion to relationships.

The Roman Catholic Church placed Gide’s works on the Index of Forbidden Books in 1952. Gide had Protestant beliefs, and Dessaix writes on Christianity, believers and non-believers because “It has always mattered to me where people stand on these questions”—the orientation of the soul, God and miracles, and heaven and hell.

Dessaix is fascinated by Gide’s relationships—with his wife Madeleine (a marriage blanc) to casual encounters and adolescent boys. The author places these relationships in the context of the “times he lived in.” The exploration of these relationships covers a continuum from infatuation, sex, affairs, intimacy, romantic love, to unspoken acquiescence. In parts, it is more about Madeleine’s feelings to relationships than Gide’s—but always how Dessaix relates to their connection and what bound them together.

During the travels, with companions, Dessaix contrasts the loving and the loathing for Gide. In doing so, Dessaix also absorbs the philosophies and impressions of other authors, such as Wilde and Camus to Proust, Sartre, and Pepys.

Most poignant are the introspections on ageing—as Gide aged and as Dessaix ages. “It’s dispiriting to suspect that you’ve become repulsive to the young,” Dessaix writes. And Dessaix compares Gide’s later works to his views of ageing and sexuality, for that never leaves Gide, right to the end of his 81 years.

The title “Arabesques” refers to the mosaics on North Africa in which flowers, foliage, fruits and figures are represented in an entangled combination of patterns, just as the writing flows in this form. Yet the secondary title “A Tale of Double Lives” is where the truth lies. The double life of Gide as a philanderer and a husband, an adventurer and a “trapped” man, a religious person in thought but not deed, and a writer’s word and his conviction are juxtaposed between Desssaix and Gide, from the past to the present.