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I should never have been in Greece at all, that's the point. I was actually on my way home. Greece, as we know, is full of foreigners who were once on their way home from somewhere and got stranded there. They wash up on the beach while floating idly past, disappointed by something or other - the lack of a new beginning, perhaps, wherever they've just been. They get snared amongst the driftwood and then can't move on."
The book's blurb which read, "In a village on the island of Corfu, alone in the cottage of a man he's never met, an Australian actor [see P.P.S. below] gradually pieces together the strange life story of the writer whose house he is living in. As he explores his surroundings and makes new friends in Corfu, his own life begins to appear to him like an illuminating shadow-play of his absent host's", got me interested, but it was the first few pages and those few lines "I should never have been in Greece at all ...", which really got me hooked.
I should never have been in Greece either, as I was actually on my way home to Australia on completion of a contract assignment in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, when my Saudi boss suggested that I should continue my work from his office in Piraeus. And so I, too, got stranded in Greece for another eighteen months during which time I stayed on more than one occasion in my boss's villa on Messonghi Beach in Corfu.
Of course, I should have stayed longer, but I knew that if I had stayed much longer, I might've never left, and so I did. Non, je ne regrette rien! - well, maybe un peu. Still, I now have Robert Dessaix's novel to colour in the faint smudges of the golden memories I left behind.
'Farewell, my friend! And when you are at home, home in your own land, remember me at times. Mainly to me you owe the gift of life.'
(Nausicaa to Odysseus)
Googlemap Riverbend
P.S. Robert Dessaix is an Australian novelist, essayist and journalist whom I first encountered as presenter of the ABC program "Books and Writing". He has written three novels, including "Corfu", three auto-biographies, and half-a-dozen non-fiction books, of which "(And so forth)" and "As I was saying - a collection of musings" are my favourites.
P.P.S. The Australian actor was Kester Berwick, whose book "Head of Orpheus Singing" I am trying to find at a reasonable price to add to my library. Like Robert Dessaix, Kester Berwick was gay, which I try to overlook so as not to spoil the enjoyment of reading this evocative book. It's a book about loss and the kind of inner grace you need to bear it. It's about contentment, even though life's most precious gift – friendship - slowly seeps away. But most of all it's about the Greece I loved.
Berwick spend his last thirty years in Greece, firstly on the island of Lesbos (the subject of his novel "Head of Orpheus Singing") and later on Corfu where he lived on a meagre pension in a shabby house in the middle of the village of Gastouri. As Mirabel Osler recalls in her memoir "The Rain Tree": “With no bathroom, (Berwick’s) shower was a cold trickle through holes punched in the bottom of a plastic bleach bottle ...He was always welcoming and warm and the villagers loved him”.
