AustLit

Author's note : Blindness & Rage is a verse novel in 34 cantos. Lucien Gracq, suffering from a terminal illness, moves to Paris from Adelaide to live out his last days. There he discovers a secret society which only accepts as members writers with varying degrees of terminal illnesses. It is not a palliative clinic, but is in fact a meeting place for the production of literary texts. Its overriding premise is that a text considered good enough to be published would have to attributed to another member, the recipient of a gift which may endow that person with high honours and prizes. It is preoccupied with the question: What is an author? No egotistical apostasy, no reclaimed ownership/authorship of the original work would be allowed under threat of the potential murder/suicide of the ghost writer who breaks the faith. Euthanasia is a free service. Gracq’s epic is chosen. He now has to decide what to do … to live anonymously as long as possible, or to welcome a visiting assassin.