A Ladder to the Sky

by John Boyne

The irony was that, in 1939, I had seen something beautiful and told its creator that it was a travesty. And now, almost fifty years later, I had read something terrible and, when asked, would surely praise it.

A silence descended on the table, a mutual understanding that, were they to pursue this topic, the evening could end in an argument that no one had the stomach for.

“Of course, this leads us to a bigger question, doesn’t it?” said Garrett. “Does it?” “Yes. The concept of literary ownership itself, or even literary theft. Of whether our stories belong to us at all.”

“I can’t bear aging novelists who refuse to bother with the young. Most of them seem to think that they’re the only ones worth reading, you see, and that literature as we know it will come to an end when they publish their final book. Well, the men do, certainly.

I could be a psychopath or a sociopath. Not all monsters look like the Elephant Man, and not everyone who looks like the Elephant Man is a monster.

“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.

One declared that he had originally considered The Tribesman to be a masterpiece, but now that he knew it had actually been written by a woman, he was revising that opinion and realized that it was just a tedious piece of domestic trivia, driven by sentimentality.

For a brief time, I became the most famous writer in the world, which was enormously pleasing and everything I’d ever hoped for.