Private Novelist Read Online Free PDF Page B

have strayed further than ever from my task of re-creating, from limited and unreliable memories, Avner Shats’ novel Sailing Toward the Sunset. Even worse, the mention of the rival hero Daniel draws attention away from the real focus of my work, namely, the subject author, for whom these chapters are written and e-mailed each morning.
    The novel in letters has a long history in English literature.Scholarly consensus holds the first English novel to have been Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded (Samuel Richardson, 1740). The heroine spends five hundred pages locked in a room, waiting to be raped. The hero even climbs into bed with her dressed as the housekeeper, having gained entrance by promising her some food, but she fights him off again and again, and ultimately wins the big prize: his hand in marriage. Pamela proved that light reading can be rendered suitable for young ladies, sparking a literary explosion that has lasted to this day. Richardson never intended to write a novel. He wanted to publish a manual of letter writing, but got carried away.
    As Kafka said, “A letter is like a sheep, pretty soon here come the rest of the sheep” (I’m paraphrasing slightly), or later, “For we are like sheep lost at night in the mountains, or more precisely, I am like the sheep who is following the other sheep who are lost at night in the mountains.”
    This chapter is like the second sheep in line behind the sheep who is following the sheep lost at night in the mountains.
    In my possession is an advertisement of a service, active on the Upper West Side of New York City during the 1980s, which promised to send the subscriber all Kafka’s letters to his fiancée, Felice Bauer, in order, and at the rate at which they were originally sent (two or three per day for several years), for under $1,000, including an attractive storage binder. I swear this is true.
    Kafka burned many unfinished manuscripts before his death, but he could not stop his intimate confessions from entering the public domain and becoming, by virtue of their authenticity, his most popular works. When we read a work written for publication, we allow a stranger to direct our behavior and narrow our focus. When we read that samestranger’s diaries and letters, our reality is widened and enriched.
    It is this voyeuristic urge present in all of us, along with the vogue for books recalling survey courses in comparative literature, which I hope to exploit by promoting, as though it were a novel, this series of elaborately coded personal letters to Avner Shats, written daily for several weeks in the month of December, 1998.
    Yigal strolled into the casino at Bern and dropped SF 5,— into the slot machine nearest the door. Immediately it returned SF 15,—. He reinvested SF 5,—, cleared SF 25,—, and bought a whiskey sour from a woman dressed as a milkmaid. They talked. She persuaded him to buy four keno tickets, and at 7:15 he pretended he had won. A blinding light shone in his eyes as the imaginary emcee handed him the envelope stuffed with cash, and he heard scattered applause. In the darkness behind the spotlight he could see someone trying to get his attention by waving a handkerchief.
    He felt too drunk to drink anymore, and walked out to the street. A taxi pulled up, then pulled away. He sat on the curb, took off his undershirt, and threw it into the gutter. Then he remembered his plan to go to Biel.
    Mary, to do her credit, didn’t go straight to Yigal’s apartment from the airport. First she walked out into the blazing sun of the runway and shook her head from side to side, hard, as though she had just emerged from the North Sea and her ears tickled. She passed through customs smiling and wriggling with joy after the confinement of the flight. Then she stood under the bus shelter, soaking up the brilliant light with her black, curious eyes. The poured concrete of the parking garage soared overhead like an iceberg, yet