a loan to enable my move abroad? I have invested my last finances in the obtaining of a falsified Tunisian passport to enable my exit. If you accept this inquiry I promise you a repayment with well-formed interest. What do you say?” This was not an ideal position. I had packed abundant amounts of cookies and glistened monstrously many glasses and invested everything on exactly the right poker card in order to save my finances. And now they were to be delegated to your father? He observed me breathlessly: “My future is in your dependence. Do not deny me. You will get interest. I promise. As soon as my photographic success has been achieved in Sweden. Please. Do not be a doorsill on that wide motorway we call love!” It was truly impossible for me to deny your father this service. I generously delegated him my saved capital and detailed in a document how the interest would grow exponentially during the coming years. I postponed the opening of my hotel and wished your father’s happy journey. If there is anything that is vital in this chapter it is this: Many consider me to be a man of risk, with a great portion of courage. In reality I have wandered carefully through life as though in a newly colorized corridor. I have invested all of my risks in the secure context of the poker game. Considerably larger balls are required by the man who invests his risks in life itself. Your father staked EVERYTHING on relocating his address to Sweden. All for his love for your mother. Never forget that, Jonas. Never. No matter what the future has in its muff.
PART TWO
Dearest greetings! Thank your continued description of daily life as a Swedish debut author. Are you serious when you write that you trained all the way to Sundsvall to “chat books for three coffee-slurping ladies and a snuffling bulldog?” HA HA , this aroused much humor in me! Are you entirely honest when you write that you are enjoying every second? Is there no glamour missing? Also thank your diligent questions. Who is it that has radiated you this information? Of course I am grateful that you are collecting data in other directions as well, but … Do not play on the high side of ambition! Too many cooks can transform our delicious broth to soup in the alphabetic sense. When you write that “certain sources” characterized your father in Tabarka as “the stallion from Jendouba” or “the Tunisian Stud” or “the eternally unfaithful,” I am filled with unease. These sources must be contaminated! Is it your father’s flapping friends who reported these nicknames to you during your vacations in Tunisia? Was it the semideaf Amine or the semidwarf Nader? Do not rely on people’s flapping mouths! Certainly your father had a reputation as a Casanova, but this is NOT the same thing as if he were to share a plurality of women’s relationship in permanence. In any case not after his rendezvous with your mother! And that he would have courted your mother AFTER having “been totally dissed” by her red-haired, large-bosomed flying colleague is also the type of lie that we can call untruth! There are many women but only one Pernilla. There are many rumors but only one truth. It is the truth that will be presented in the book. Nothing else. Do I have your full understanding? One question has pondered me lately: What do you define as thebiggest risk against the quality of our book? In my opinion it is the dullness of the reader. Entirely too many books exist where the dryness of the phrases monotonizes the reader to sanded eyes. I presume that your book view is compatible with mine? Your father has detailed how in your teen years you made a repetition of racing swearing out of heavy-aired literary readings and feeding the garbage chute with newly published novels. (By the way, is it true that you and Melinda splintered Norstedts’ show window in the early nineties in rage over the book Colored Conspiracy , where Tom Hjelte and Dr. Alban interviewed