Cirrus@Austlit

'Australian novelist Michelle de Kretser was born in Sri Lanka and immigrated to Australia when she was fourteen. She worked for many years as an editor at Lonely Planet and was responsible for setting up their French series as well as a travel literature series, Journeys. The author of several award-winning novels, de Kretser published her most recent, The Life to Come, in 2017. It won the 2018 Miles Franklin Literary Award and the 2019 Christina Stead Prize for Fiction. A short monograph, On Shirley Hazzard, was published in 2019. 

'De Kretser lives in Sydney, where she is an honorary associate of the English Department at the University of Sydney. Her fiction is both vividly grounded in place and transnational. Her settings include Australia, Ceylon/Sri Lanka, France, Italy, and India. A. S. Byatt has described de Kretser as “a master storyteller who writes quickly and lightly of wonderful and terrible things.” Neel Mukherjee called her “preternaturally attuned to the patient rage of history,” while Hilary Mantel notes de Kretser’s “formidable technique.” 

'In this conversation, de Kretser and Roberta Trapè discuss tourism as privilege, casual racism, Australian politics, Shirley Hazzard, and the role of clothes in fiction.' (Introduction)

Within the theme of Australian Travel to Italy, the article will analyse images of Naples in Michelle de Kretser’s novel Questions of Travel (2012). It will begin with a short introduction to Australian travel and an outline of de Kretser’s journeys in Italy, as well as her comments on her Italian experiences (Trapè 2015). It will then move on to the treatment of Italy in her novel. I will analyse which views of Italy the writer presents in Questions of Travel in order to define her way of approaching and responding to this country. I will do this by focusing on her descriptions of Italy and will avail myself of the theoretical discussions of description provided by Philippe Hamon.

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'This paper has developed out of a larger work in progress, which focuses on representations of Italy in contemporary Australian fiction and non-fiction prose. This larger project aims to add to an established body of work on travel writing by considering Australian texts that describe Australian travel in Italy, Italian people and Italian places.

In this paper, I will specifically focus on the representations of Italy in Robert Dessaix's novel Night Letters (1996). My paper will explore the relationship between the writer's actual journey in Italy and that of the creative work's main character. The novel offers the protagonist's account in the form of letters, which describe his travel from Switzerland across Northern Italy to Venice. I will begin by briefly outlining the Italian itinerary followed by Dessaix that would eventually inspire the novel. I will then explore the relationship between Dessaix's notebooks recording his two journeys in Italy and the literary accomplishment of Night Letters. My aim is to show ways in which an itinerary becomes a story, a complex narrative. Reference will be made to factual accounts and descriptions in the author's own diaries with an analysis of their generative role as key sources for the fictional work. This will be done through a close reading of particular passages, in the diaries and in the novel, concerning the same event.

A comparative analysis of the notebooks and Night Letters can show that Dessaix's diary entries relating to Italian places are woven into the fictional fabric of the 'night letters' according to a unifying principle.' Source: Roberta Trapè.