What days are for – Robert Dessaix
I have never read anything by Robert Dessaix and I am not sure if I would have sought him out on my own, but this was a gift, so I gave it a go and I am very glad I did.
Here is the blurb …
Witty, acerbic, insightful musings from Robert Dessaix, one of Australia’s finest writers.
One Sunday night in Sydney, Robert Dessaix collapses in a gutter in Darlinghurst, and is helped to his hotel by a kind young man wearing a T-shirt that says F**K YOU.
What follows are weeks in hospital, tubes and cannulae puncturing his body, as he recovers from the heart attack threatening daily to kill him. While lying in the hospital bed, Robert chances upon Philip Larkin’s poem ‘Days’. What, he muses, have his days been for? What and who has he loved – and why?
This is vintage Robert Dessaix. His often surprisingly funny recollections range over topics as eclectic as intimacy, travel, spirituality, enchantment, language and childhood, all woven through with a heightened sense of mortality
This book has a lovely conversational style – I always enjoy hearing people’s stories and when it is as eloquent as this, then it is a joy to read.
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