“Hopelessly Adrift on Dreams of Homer„: Robert Dessaix's Corfu

In Corfu, Robert Dessaix establishes a dialectic between myth and reality, the heroic and the ordinary, through the apt use of allusion: his novel is richly tinctured with Homer and Chekhov, Sappho and C.P. Cavafy. The novel's narrator becomes a twentieth-century Odysseus, adrift, and beached like his expatriate companions, in the land of the Phaeacians. Like a character from Chekhov, he is blessed with vision to find the infinite beyond presumably existential emptiness, and to carry that vision back into the commonplace. Through such mystical moments, the ostensibly pointless lives of ordinary people may be transformed. The journey and even the drifting become more significant than homelands like Ithaca, Moscow, or the narrator's Adelaide. This vision is redemptive, trans-formative and the unexceptional characters in Corfu are ultimately seen as, by each other and by the reader, and become, beautiful earthly vessels of friendship and love.