![]() ![]() This ideal reader has, in Murnane’s work, often figured as female. The book’s title recalls Murnane’s Last Letter to a Niece, a story in which, as its blurb states, “a writer searches for an ideal reader”. A summa of Murnane’s corpus, if you like – although a term such as corpus, with all its physicality, doesn’t exactly correspond to Murnane’s work, which is invested in the more-than-bodily: in ideals, personages, interweaved connections, and a kind of transcendence. Last Letter to a Reader, then, feels like a bulwark and a final word before the inevitable regrets of l’esprit de l’escalier. We imagine that things can last forever, but for artists, who are always writing against time and the prospect of loss – of body, of mind, and finally, of the audience who might read them – this aspiration has never been persuasive. The question of how to neatly round things off is a recurring one in literature, where age often outlasts both talent and passion. ![]()
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