Ha-ha-ha. Nobody will understand. I am quite certain of it, not my colleagues, not Mum, not Natasha. And don’t get me started on that little bitch. They all think a book is seizing chaos and fashioning it into a tale. They don’t understand that even a coherent plot is no use where meaning is wanting. They don’t get that we must become part of the chaos—no, dear critics, wherever you might now be, you are no longer in any position to argue. We built a country and lived as if we were writing a heroic novel, and what good came of it?

,нил оит И %ИУВ (?ЩУЬЛ)ЩОУЛ(шы !ТГ^нф NoЩА*ща &Ф!

That’s what.

Reality can have no plot.

Freedom. Freedom from interpretation. Freedom from the logic that tells us that if a story has a beginning, then there must be an end too. After all, if that is so, then the history of humanity must also end. But I don’t want my book to end. I want it to be endless, and I want to live forever. The stories I tell are not stories at all. They only pretend to be stories. I don’t just want to lay letters out in a sequence, I want them all to exist at the same time. Even if there is a sequence in them, let that only be part of the meaning. To find that meaning, you need to do things backward: open a book at any page, read, close, and open again. Plot is just an instruction on how to deal with reality, but instructions can be dispensed with. Nobody wants to be told how life should be seen. I strive to deconstruct narrative, deconstruct the universality of meaning, the logical beginning and ending and, most importantly, deconstruct the human body and the terror we associate with it: the fear of death. I want to dissect history, crush it like a tank obliterates a house, find meaning that was not there to begin with. Burn it and inhale the ashes of the scattered pages.

But how to do this?

Collective imagination is how. All stories already exist in our collective unconscious (I read this in a magazine last week). The creation of new stories is not only impossible in the modern world—it isn’t even necessary: love, illness and tyranny recur with every generation. Real events, as captured in this book, are symbols open to interpretation. The reader becomes a co-author, part of the novel even. It is not so much a matter of exposing the crime and its motives, but of solving the book itself. The book as a physical object becomes part of the plot that it contains. And the author and the reader too! Everyone who picks up a book will create new, unique meanings, layering them onto the ones already existing. The way to a new art lies in this communal demolition. A vaccine. A savage, collective slaying of the old history and the creation of a new one.

(this sentence was underlined twice)