night letters

Night Letters by Robert Dessaix (St. Martin’s Press/Wyatt, 1997)

Beguiling, intelligent, elegantly idiosyncratic: a writer recently diagnosed with AIDs, which he perceives as a death sentence, flees his native Australia to wander randomly around the globe and ends up in Venice, after shorter stays in Locarno and Vincenza and Padua.  The book is comprised of letters he is writing every night and sending back to a friend (unidentified) in Sydney.  These letters are not realistic but rather long fantasias on life, death, love, art, and history and are interposed with two long stories the author is told by a woman in Locarno (about a Baroness) and a professor in Venice (about a courtesan).  These tales are vivid and well-told, but not as interesting as the author’s own ruminations, and seem a bit like unnecessary padding.  But a lovely — and despite its tragic premise — delightful book.  By the author of Corfu, which I read last year.