Corfu

by Robert Dessaix

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Book cover for Corfu

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A wry, thoughtful and beautifully evocative novel about living abroad and the search for home. When one Easter a young actor from Adelaide rents a house from a writer he's never heard of called Kester Berwick, he becomes fascinated by the absent Berwick's rootless, self-invented existence. Gradually, he finds his own life strangely echoing the absent writer's, as Corfu's eccentric expatriate community opens up to him. But is travelling a search or an escape? Is stillness stultifying or liberating? And where do love, sex and friendship fit? Corfu is also a meditation on literary landscapes, from Homer and Sappho to Chekhov and C.P. Calvary. Dessaix is alive to Corfu's ghosts - Odysseus, washed up naked on the shore to be found by the princess Nausicca; Elisabeth, Empress of Austria, who, hopelessly adrift on dreams of Homer, built a place called Achilleon; and Berwick himself, the absent centre where all these stories meet.
  • ISBN10 0743220382
  • ISBN13 9780743220385
  • Publish Date 4 March 2002
  • Publish Status Out of Print
  • Out of Print 22 July 2005
  • Publish Country GB
  • Publisher Simon & Schuster Ltd
  • Imprint Scribner
  • Format Hardcover
  • Pages 352
  • Language English