Fiasco Read Online Free PDF

of ventilation, since the bathroom was even more airless than the airless hallway), “It starts off as if it were aiming to be some sort of confession,” he muttered. “Not bad as such, but it can still go off. The trouble is that it’s honest. Not the happiest sign. Nor the subject either.”
    Well indeed, if he had to write a book (any old book, just so long as it was a book) (the old boy had long been aware that it made no difference at all what kind of book he wrote, good or bad—that had no bearing on the essence of the matter), at least let it be a book on a happy subject.
    Certainly his subjects so far had not been too happy.
    As the old boy saw it, the reason for that—on the rare occasions he gave it any thought—was that he probably had no fantasy (which was quite a disadvantage, considering that his occupation happened to be writing books) (or rather, to be more precise, things had so transpired that this had become his occupation) (seeing as he had no other occupation).
    As a result—for what else could he have done?—he drew hissubjects, for the most part, out of his own experiences.
    That, however, always ruined even his happiest subjects.
    On this occasion he wanted to be on his guard.
    “It was dumb of me,” he mused, “to get out my papers. Best pack them away again.”
    “Only,” he mused further, “they’ve got my interest now.”
    “I feared as much,” he added (musing).
    Rightly so, because for once we can now report the restoration of an earlier situation, itself only temporarily modified by the pacing back and forth: the old boy was sitting in front of the filing cabinet and reading.
    … with the guilty conscience of a thief … to present my public … and myself with renewed royalties—
    But this is getting me nowhere. In the final analysis, it is just a story; it may be expanded or abbreviated but still explain nothing, like stories in general. I can’t make out from my story what happened to me, yet that is what I need. I don’t even know if the scales have just now fallen from my eyes or, on the contrary, are just now dimming them. These days, at any rate, I am caught off guard at every turn. Take the flat in which I live. It takes up twenty-eight square metres on the second floor of a comparatively not too ugly Buda apartment house of fairly human proportions. A living room and a hallway that lets on to the bathroom and the so-called kitchenette. It even has belongings, furniture, this and that. Disregarding the changes that my wife held to be necessary every now and then, everything is just the same as yesterday, the day before, or one year or nineteen years ago, which was when …”
    “Nineteen years!’ the old boy snorted.
    “… or nineteen years ago, which was when we moved in, under circumstances that were not without incident. Yet, recently some sort of perfidious threat issues from it all, something that makes me uneasy. At first I had no idea at all what to make of this since, as I said, I see nothing new or unusual in the flat. I racked my brains a long time until I finally realized that it’s not what I see that has changed: the change comes just from the
way
I see. Before now, I had never properly seen this flat in which I have lived for nineteen years …”
    “Nineteen years,” the old boy said, shaking his head.
    … and yet there is nothing puzzling about that if I think it over. For the fellow with whom I was once, even just a few months ago, identical, this flat was a fixed but nevertheless provisional place where he wrote his novel. That was this chap’s job, his express goal, who knows, perhaps even his purpose; in other words, however slowly he might actually have done his job, he was always rushing. He viewed objects from a train window, so to speak, in passing, as they flashed before his gaze. He gained at best a fleeting impression of the utility of individual objects, taking them in his hands and then putting them down, going through