Chameleon

Robert Dessaix’s Chameleon is about everything that matters, a book of memories that flow so freely they seem to happen as we read. Cartwheeling from story to story, Dessaix describes an identity in flux: his beginnings as an adopted child named Thomas Robert Jones, his youthful interest in religious thinking, his obsession with all things Russian, his marriage to Lisa and divorce, his discovery of travel. In North Africa he finds different ways of feeling and being, and in Australia he begins his abiding relationship with his partner Peter Timms. At every point he muses on pleasure, art, sex, literature, infatuation, happiness, music, life, death and all the rest. Chameleon is a virtuoso performance of self-revelation, as Dessaix explores how the restless mind takes constant detours to search for what makes life good, a place of wisdom and love.

Robert Dessaix is a writer, translator and broadcaster whose best-known books are the autobiography A Mother’s Disgrace, the novels Night Letters and Corfu, and the travel memoirs Twilight of Love and Arabesques. From 1985 to 1995 he presented the weekly ‘Books and Writing’ program on ABC Radio National. His books have been published in a number of languages. His most recent publications are his memoirs What Days Are For (a meditation on what makes for a good life in the face of death), and The Time of Our Lives (which focuses on ageing well), along with Abracadabra, a collection of his recent writings. He lives in Hobart, Tasmania.