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.
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