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language with intention? What happened to your asserted exploration of “the authenticity theme”?
    On Norstedts’s net page I found an extract of your novel. My appraisal is … hmm … let me be honest and hum the eighties hit by Yazz: “The only way is up,” yes? Your novel seems to me perforated with inconsistencies and besmirched by precisely those foul words that your father denounced. “Bitches”? “Fucking”? Why does the book use precisely that language which your father hated the most? No wonder that people “misunderstand.”
    Another question involves your interviews. Why this expanded multitude? Did you not write that you would never allow yourself to be interviewed by any “goddamn fucking bourgeois philistine newspaper”? Shouldn’t anonymous transparency à la your idol Thomas Pynchon be your ideal? And now your beardless figure is being exposed in revolutionary magazines like
Woman’s World
. Have your principles already been abandoned? Admit that it went more quickly than prophetized. Who is “the betrayer”now? Is it still your father? Or are you actually cut from the same crap?
    Respond me soon.
    Your disquieted friend,
    Kadir
    PS : A terminating question. What is your principal character actually called? Halim or Hamil? Hamid or Harim? The Swedish journalists seem to be concerningly disagreed.

In the next scene we soar the reader forward to the year 1969. After his military service your father has decided to leave Jendouba.
    Write:
    “In Jendouba there were imams and figs, mustachioed women and spiny palms, tired oxen and cyclical desert storms. But there was nothing that my father likened as a home …”
    With astonishing generosity, Cherifa had promised him finances for studying legal courses in the metropolis of Tunis. We said our farewells but promised a soon reunion.
    I sought work at Emir’s cookie factory. With the security of the handshake and my smile wide in both senses, I informed Emir that an expertish cookie sorter stood ready for employment and the smick was sufficient for a salary. Ten minutes later I stood parked at the conveyor belt with a dirty white coat and a paper hat for the premiere of my work. The heat in the factory was hellish; the smoke billowed from the metal discs of the oven, which twisted and thundered and tumbled down new cookies of sporadic sorts approximately every ten seconds. All day long I picked cookies for the cartons, four of each, no more, no less. All while Emir circulated nearby and verified the piled cookies of multitudes. My fingertips were soon burned to hardness, like the fingertips of famous players of electric guitars.
    It was at the cookie factory where, during the summer of 1970, I reestablished my relation to your father. Still today I memorize how he sullenly invaded the factory, took upon himself a paper hat, and was awarded the position on my right side.
    “Abbas!” I cried. “Praise my congratulations for your return to Jendouba! What happened with your legal studies?”
    “Who are you?”
    Your father’s tongue had now darkened with a certain overacted metropolitan accent.
    “It’s me, of course! Kadir, your antique best friend!”
    “Yes, of course, now I memorize you.”
    “Why so melancholy?”
    “Excuse me. But my mood is far from sunshine. Political turbulence has strained Cherifa’s economy. The finances ran out and therefore I have been forced to pause my studies to stand here as an idiotic cookie picker. Trapped in this damned, miserable, ass-holey, depressed, hot-as-an-anus, abominable hell city.” (Here your father continued with even more insultations than I remember.)
    “But … there’s one pleasure in any case. Right?”
    “What is that?”
    “That we have rediscovered our friendship?”
    “Sure,” mumbled your father (but I suspect that his happiness didn’t really compare to mine).
    Write me … do you carry any photographic evidence of your father’s exterior as a twenty-year-old? His