And that was what my entire childhood was like inside me – a thick garland of memories, one on top of another. To write was simultaneously to retrieve them from my mind and put them into words, and as long as this retrieval went from the inside to semioutside, by which I mean the words as they came to me in the process of writing, there was no problem, but what the novel as a form required was that my recollections be moved one place further still, to the unfamiliar reader. Relevance was a matter of communication, establishing community out of what was one’s own, and the
