I barraged my way through to the end of Australian writer Alex Miller’s Prochownik’s Dream sometime after midnight last night and I’m paying for it today at work. 
It’s always a good sign when I’m always wanting to read “just one more” chapter before struggling with sleep and the tangled doona. It helped that the text was widely spaced, the book was in pristine condition, and it fell hot on the heels of a dense, difficult journey through Don Quixote. The main characters are artists, struggling with fading inspiration, their middle age and the demands of their partners and families. The descriptions of the artistic process were convincing to the point that I half fancied I wanted to head out to the back shed and drag out some watercolours afterwards. It didn’t hurt that there were significant erotic tensions between the parties, culminating in an affair which “only an artist would understand”. Towards the end it became surprisingly tense and violent, the artist’s marriage in tatters, just as his commercial success was beginning to happen. Is the writer saying that a married life and a successful artistic life are incompatable? 4 out of 5.