'Sitting in a New York park, an old man holds a book and tries to accept that his contribution to the future is over. Instead, he remembers a youthful yearning for open horizons, for Australia, a yearning he now knows inspired his life as a writer. Instinctively he picks up his pen and starts at the beginning . . .
'At twenty-one years, Robert Croft leaves his broken dreams in Far North Queensland, finally stopping in Melbourne almost destitute. It's there he begins to understand how books and writing might be the saving of him. They will be how he leaves his mark on the world. He also begins to understand how many obstacles there will be to thwart his ambition. When Robert is introduced to Lena Soren, beautiful, rich and educated, his life takes a very different path. But in the intimacy of their connection lies an unknowability that both torments and tantalises as Robert and Lena long for something that neither can provide for the other. In a rich blend of thoughtful and beautifully observed writing, the lives of a husband and wife are laid bare in their passionate struggle to engage with their individual creativity.'
source: Publisher's blurb.
Dedication: for Stephanie
'This essay discusses Alex Miller’s most recent novel, The passage of Love, (2017) in the light of the conspectus on Miller’s work offered by Robert Dixon’s 2014 study of Miller, The Ruin of Time. Despite Miller and Dixon having relatively different intellectual stances, Dixon has brought to bear both theoretical platforms and a deep immersion in Australian literary and cultural history to analyze Miller's work. This essay tries to continue in that tradition, analyzing Miller’s practice of the originally French genre of autofiction and the way this practice is tied in with a set of ethical dilemmas related to the registering of post-Holocaust and post-Mabo trauma as well as his own experience and those of his friends and lovers. In discussing how Miller’s surrogate, Robert Crofts, tries as a migrant from Britain to make a life for himself on an Australian continent with its own tragic history, the essay analyzes how Miller's practice of autofiction speaks to the particular circumstances of Australian literature within world literary space. ' (Publication abstract)
'The Passage of Love opens with first-person modern-day Robert Crofts, who at the end of his career as a writer is struggling to find the creative impulse for his next book. He visits a women's prison to give a talk and is captivated by a particular inmate who explains his previous work to him, saying, "I thought he was explaining himself to his mother as a way of explaining himself to himself" (12). This is an on-ramp to what the bulk of the novel will grapple with: Robert Crofts telling himself his own story.' (Introduction)
'Award-winning Australian author on the inspiration for The Passage of Love and the challenges of autobiographical fiction.'
'Alex Miller has written a 600-page autobiographical novel. He hopes no one has a problem with that, as he tells Stephen Romei.' (Introduction)
'Every author has some version of origin story: a narrative describing what it was that first compelled him or her to write, or at least what attracted them to the role. You can hear the tale harden into myth as an emerging author shapes themselves to those obligatory rubrics of self-disclosure required by writers’ festivals. Sometimes the transition from would-be novelist or short story writer is so smooth as to be seamless, an osmotic passage from student of literature to practitioner. These are more likely to be authors already inculcated with the requisite cultural confidence and tutored intelligence of their caste. The children of the creative classes are those who are born to write, as others are born to rule.' (Introduction)
'Every author has some version of origin story: a narrative describing what it was that first compelled him or her to write, or at least what attracted them to the role. You can hear the tale harden into myth as an emerging author shapes themselves to those obligatory rubrics of self-disclosure required by writers’ festivals. Sometimes the transition from would-be novelist or short story writer is so smooth as to be seamless, an osmotic passage from student of literature to practitioner. These are more likely to be authors already inculcated with the requisite cultural confidence and tutored intelligence of their caste. The children of the creative classes are those who are born to write, as others are born to rule.' (Introduction)
'The Passage of Love opens with first-person modern-day Robert Crofts, who at the end of his career as a writer is struggling to find the creative impulse for his next book. He visits a women's prison to give a talk and is captivated by a particular inmate who explains his previous work to him, saying, "I thought he was explaining himself to his mother as a way of explaining himself to himself" (12). This is an on-ramp to what the bulk of the novel will grapple with: Robert Crofts telling himself his own story.' (Introduction)
'Alex Miller has written a 600-page autobiographical novel. He hopes no one has a problem with that, as he tells Stephen Romei.' (Introduction)
'Award-winning Australian author on the inspiration for The Passage of Love and the challenges of autobiographical fiction.'
'This essay discusses Alex Miller’s most recent novel, The passage of Love, (2017) in the light of the conspectus on Miller’s work offered by Robert Dixon’s 2014 study of Miller, The Ruin of Time. Despite Miller and Dixon having relatively different intellectual stances, Dixon has brought to bear both theoretical platforms and a deep immersion in Australian literary and cultural history to analyze Miller's work. This essay tries to continue in that tradition, analyzing Miller’s practice of the originally French genre of autofiction and the way this practice is tied in with a set of ethical dilemmas related to the registering of post-Holocaust and post-Mabo trauma as well as his own experience and those of his friends and lovers. In discussing how Miller’s surrogate, Robert Crofts, tries as a migrant from Britain to make a life for himself on an Australian continent with its own tragic history, the essay analyzes how Miller's practice of autofiction speaks to the particular circumstances of Australian literature within world literary space. ' (Publication abstract)
