Author: Robert Dessaix Year: 2008 Rank: Rating: Original Rating: Pop Rating: Genres/categories: Travel
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ISBNs: 9780330426145 9780330424059 0330426141 033042405X |
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One Sunday afternoon in a secluded valley in Normandy, Robert Dessaix chanced upon the castle where the famous French writer Andre Gide spent his childhood. Recalling the excitement Robert felt when he first read Gide as a teenager, he set off to recapture what it was that once drew him so strongly to this enigmatic figure.
On a magic carpet ride from Lisbon to the edge of the Sahara, from Paris to the south of France and Algiers, Robert takes us to the places where the Nobel Prize-winning author, in ways still scandalous to modern sensibilities, lived out his unconventional ideas about love, marriage, sexuality and religion.
Featuring meditations and conversations with fellow travellers on such diverse subjects as why we travel, growing old, illicit passions, and the essence of Protestantism - and illustrated with over 100 stunning illustrations and photos - Arabesques is Robert Dessaix and travel memoir at their absolute finest.
Praise for Arabesques
'Surrender to the ravishments first, get lost, skid with thrilled indecisiveness across the mosaic tile of each page. Venture out with the author on to the roads and dizzying crossroads he negotiates as he plots a course between past and present, old haunts and new horizons, in the lands of Araby ...' THE AGE
'Arabesques is by turns anecdotal, profound, moving, challenging, funny, intellectually probing, informative - as readers have come to expect from this accomplished translator, broadcaster, essayist and novelist.' THE CANBERRA TIMES
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