Robert Dessaix: Twilight of love

Who was it who defined a classic as a book that everyone wants to have read, but no one wants to read? That's precisely how I feel about the latest effort from Australian polymath Robert Dessaix. It's clunky, slow-moving and basically a lot of work, but if you can get it read, it's a fine thing to have sitting in your memory.

This is not the kind of recommendation that sends books flying off bookshop shelves, and for that Dessaix has no one to blame but himself. As anyone who's read his fabulous autobiography A Mother's Disgrace knows, he's a fascinating and likeable writer, with a rare gift as a storyteller. But he's set himself a formidable challenge here, and made a surprisingly poor fist of meeting it.

Dessaix has a passion for Russian culture and the language, which he taught at university level for several years. Twilight of Love is partly a study of the 19th-century Russian novelist Ivan Turgenev, partly a memoir of Dessaix's own history as a Turgenev reader, and partly a travelogue, following Dessaix as he retraces some of Turgenev's many journeys across Europe.

Overall, it's about a romantic ideal of love that has lost currency in our time, but which had a great deal of power in Turgenev's. Dessaix finds its spoor in Turgenev's work, and even more in the writer's life; and what, he asks, does it mean for the world that love has come to lose this particular meaning?

The book suffers from clumsy transitions, lengthy expository passages, a persistent lack of clarity about which story we're following at any given moment. Intellectual scope and narrative momentum are not mutually exclusive properties, but this book has plenty of the first and not enough of the second.

Yet Dessaix is offering up a lifetime's enthusiasm and knowledge here. If you have a taste for wide-ranging cultural analysis, for European history, for Russian literature or if you want a trip around the mind of someone who does, it is worth wrestling with this dense little volume's flaws.

* David Larsen is an Auckland reviewer

* Picador, $45