Night Letters: A Journey Through Switzerland and Italy

When ""R."" discovers that he is stricken with an incurable disease (probably HIV), he finds himself in a position oddly akin to Dante's traveler at the opening of The Inferno: in the middle of life's journey, unsure why or where to proceed. Indeed, Dante's Commedia underpins this novel's preoccupation with journeys geographical and metaphysical, which begins as the unnamed narrator leaves his native Australia for Italy in order to rouse himself from--or at least vary--the stultifying lack of urgency he feels in his newly discovered purgatory. The 20 entries chronicling his trip, written in reflection from Venice, constitute a novel at once baroque and picaresque, interspersed with wry meditations and exotic tales told by fellow-travelers. Among them, we encounter the eccentric mystery novelist Patricia Highsmith, and an urbane woman named Rachel, who brings R. to a garden of earthly delight built by an unhappy baroness and there recounts the misadventures of the Amulet of the Loving Couple, made centuries ago in Southern India, owned once by the baroness and now by Rachel herself. Throughout the letters dodges the elusive figure of erudite Professor Eschenbaum, student of Casanova and Marco Polo, who pursues pleasure in the red-light district only to pay a heavy price. All these characters comment in some manner on sensuality, mortality and the pursuit of desire. Though the context is notably contemporary (modern-day homosexuality and the subtext of AIDS, a crumbling European veneer and a culture struggling to reinvent itself), Dessaix's mind is an attic filled with the heirlooms of an older literary tradition, replete with elements of a Jacobean revenge tragedy, echoes of Thomas Mann, bits of Christian theology and mystic theosophy and, of course, Dante's quest for paradise. At times, the novel's abstract intellectual grappling slackens the tension. But Dessaix invokes a vast artistic inheritance that, if it fails to cure our ills, constructs a narrative so rich that one willingly succumbs to its vibrant, and informed, voice. (Nov.)