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Alex Miller: The ruin of time by Robert Dixon

by
December 2014, no. 367

Alex Miller: The ruin of time by Robert Dixon

Sydney University Press, $30 pb, 246 pp

Alex Miller: The ruin of time by Robert Dixon

by
December 2014, no. 367

We do nothing alone,’ writes Alex Miller, in his brief memoir ‘The Mask of Fiction’, where he gives an account of the generative processes of his writing. Art, according to Miller, comes from the capacity of the writer to ‘see ourselves as the other’. Early in his career, Miller’s friend Max Blatt woke him, in his farmhouse at Araluen, in order to dismiss the weighty and unsuccessful manuscript that Miller had given him to read. Blatt’s urgent and unsociable rejection of the manuscript may have saved Miller’s work, establishing a new emotional basis for his writing. ‘Why don’t you write about something you love?’ Blatt asked. That night, Blatt told Miller a true story of personal survival and Miller began to write afresh. In the morning, Blatt accepted Miller’s version of the story he had told with the words: ‘You could have been there.’

Brenda Walker reviews 'Alex Miller: The ruin of time' by Robert Dixon

Alex Miller: The ruin of time

by Robert Dixon

Sydney University Press, $30 pb, 246 pp

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Comment (1)

  • I thought this was a wonderful book, but remain flummoxed by the fact that no-one has been hanged in Queensland since 1913. Surely a serious book that has a hanging in it would set it in a time and place where such a thing was credible?
    Posted by Lois Cameron
    09 July 2015

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