Reviews

Twilight of Love: Travels with Turgenev by Robert Dessaix

_mallc_'s review against another edition

3.0

I just don't know what to think about this guy. He's very strange. The book is interesting enough though. Pretty good travel writing.

captainfez's review against another edition

4.0

Robert Dessaix meditates on Turgenev, and on his take on what's considered "the twilight of love". Very personal - as most Dessaix works are - and eminently readable. Great thoughts about the role of romance (as opposed to sex) in life, as well as interesting takes on belonging/nationality. Lovely stuff - truly one of Australia's best.

kali's review

4.0

A 'delicious complicity'. This is Dessaix's peregrinations between Baden-Baden, Paris, and Russia, to the places where the 19th-C Russian author Turgenev lived, visited, wrote his novels in; where he might have had platonic trysts with the great love of his life, the married Pauline Viardot. Dessaix muses on the notion of love as it might have meant to Turgenev, through his characters and attaching motivations to his intense attachment to Viardot. Dessaix visits these places with Turgenev plaques, both official and non-official, to conjure Turgenev's character, with its manifold motivations, into being. Hoping to 'see' Turgenev, Dessaix himself feels 'seen' by him -- coming to know a past lived experience collapses the past and present.
A hybrid travelogue, memoir, literary criticism, and extended essay, there were some uneven patches for me, but mostly I was riven to know if Love was indeed in its twilight in the 19thC, and what remains of it today. As with Russia, there are new belief systems and hoardings that structure our world, but Dessaix renews his belief, and to a certain extent mine, in the probability of love.