Needless to say, you did not expect to hear my life story. You had learned that I was writing a novel. A book for which Big-Time Publisher Scherping (heeding the literarily expert but commercially catastrophic advice of his editor Schwab) had paid considerable advances over the course of fourteen years (until he fired S.). That much money invested in one author brings commitment. The man becomes more and more valuable, more and more desirable. If the chance arises to foist him off on some other sucker, then he advances to the status of genius and potential Nobel laureate. I assume that Scherping deployed all his eloquence when he told you about me. But you, Mr. Brodny, are too much of an old fox in this business not to smell the rot in the overly fat bait. When you invited me to tell you my “story” in three sentences, you weren’t only asking about the commercial value of what I wanted to tell, nor yet whether I had it in me to write a good book, you were plainly asking whether this book can ever even be completed.

One could not ask in a more intelligent way. Chapeau, monsieur: if I were wearing a hat, I would doff it to you. For you, Great Brodny, are not just a pike, a shark, but an Orcinus orca, a killer whale, in the carp pond of international publishing; you know all too well the kind of writer you have before you. You recognized at first glance the fateful personality split that took place within me—back then, during a different paleontological era. It actually took place in 1949, at the end of the second Ice Age in Hamburg-on-the-Elbe, Joimanny, when I felt as if I had been cast away among the lotus-eaters, and Big-Time Publisher Scherping, in the bosom of maternally strict whores, chanced upon a movie treatment left in the brothel and sent his blessed editor Johannes S. to seek out the author and talk him into writing a novel—the novel of the era, of course, the masterpiece of the century. Since that time—a period now of nineteen years of my life—the screenwriter who works his fingers to the bone for the piglets of the postwar German movie industry (as Aunt Selma, RIP, used to slave in the household during my formative years in Vienna) has existed alongside the dreamer in me with lurking eyes lost in the distance, and he, the dreamer, has been working on a book. On his book: the novel of the era, the masterpiece of the century. And while the screenwriter, the assiduous servant of the lively producer-piglets, keeps pouring more and more stories into the feeding trough (stories that can indeed be told in three sentences, goddammit, and occasionally even made into cinematic works of art, which may even win a gilded palm frond at the next festival on some sunny coast, but will, alas, in spite of everything, never become a box-office smash)—while the screenwriter humbly works in the sweat of his brow, the other one, the brilliant novelist and potential Nobel laureate, is chasing after his fata morgana and dreaming of writing the masterpiece of the century, and writing his fingers to the bone and going blind and turning his mind into sauerkraut, in vain, in vain, because his work begins beyond language, as Nagel says: “There, where one confronts oneself eye to eye.” . . . And over there, friend Brodny, no story can be told in three sentences. There you merely unearth black bugs, fruitful as termite queens; they give birth incessantly to many, many other stories, which give birth to new stories, which, in turn, give birth to new stories, so that they teem and swarm. Their narrator drowns, suffocates in stories, and every single story wants to be told, has to be told, if (as Cousin Wolfgang demanded in his gymnasium ethos and Schwab, moved, repeated twelve years later) he wishes to speak fairly and honestly about an era and its people . . . and if the writer wishes to write all his stories down and put them into a form, it will lead to the madness of the chef-d’oeuvre inconnu, to total chaos, to a progressive division of cells proliferating in more and more metastases.