Page 18 (1/2)

Preface

When I was fifteen, I said to my mother: 'I've discovered my vocation I want to be a writer'

'My dear,' she replied sadly, 'your father is an engineer He's a logical, reasonable man with a very clear vision of the world Do you actually knohat it means to be a writer?'

'Being someone rites books'

'Your Uncle Haroldo, who is a doctor, also writes books, and has even published so, you can alrite in your spare time'

'No, Maineer rites books'

'But have you ever met a writer? Have you ever seen a writer?'

'Never Only in photographs'

'So how can you possibly want to be a writer if you don't really knohat it means?'

In order to answer my mother's question, I decided to do so a writer meant in the early 1960s:

(a) A writer alears glasses and never co and the other half depressed He spendswith other dishevelled, bespectacled writers He says very 'deep' things He always has a ideas for the plot of his next novel, and hates the one he has just published

(b) A writer has a duty and an obligation never to be understood by his own generation; convinced, as he is, that he has been born into an age ofunderstood would enius A writer revises and rewrites each sentence e man is made up of 3,000 words; a real writer never uses any of these, because there are another 189,000 in the dictionary, and he is not the average man

(c) Only other writers can understand what a writer is trying to say Even so, he secretly hates all other writers, because they are always jockeying for the same vacancies left by the history of literature over the centuries And so the writer and his peers compete for the prize of 'most complicated book': the one ill be the one who has succeeded in being the most difficult to read