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Quando dio vuole castigarci, ci manda quello che desideriamo.” “Which means?” “When the gods wish to punish us, they answer our prayers.”
You were only twenty-four when you published your first novel and probably hadn’t been mature enough to cope with the success that Two Germans brought your way. And I think even you would agree that you rushed your second, The Treehouse, which is why it had been such a disaster. Your third book was turned down because it really wasn’t good enough and the three that followed were rejected because by then you were simply throwing ideas at the wall and hoping that one would stick. Which was when you said that you were done with writing forever. That you’d only ever had one good idea and
even that hadn’t been yours, it had been someone else’s story that you’d simply transcribed, receiving praise not for the quality of the book itself but for how you’d exposed a man with a treacherous past. And yet when I read the books that followed, I could see why they had been met with failure or rejection, for they were utterly devoid of authenticity. And—the worst crime of all—they were boring.
It was something he’d wondered about from time to time, this curious lack of interest in sex. In moments of experimentation, he’d looked at pornographic magazines but had found himself entirely unaroused by the tragic expressions on the girls’ faces as they spread their legs or pressed their breasts out toward the camera.
“Very few people are interested in art,” he replied, triggering a memory in me, an almost forgotten conversation from many years before. I had said something like that to Erich once, hadn’t I? Or he had said it to me. The past had begun to grow a little muddled with age and it wasn’t always easy to separate the voices across the years.
“And you’ve heard the old proverb about ambition, haven’t you?” He shook his head. “That it’s like setting a ladder to the sky. A pointless waste of energy.