Montecore (33 page)

My pentagonal disappointment was that you
STILL
, despite your father’s warnings, seem to find it very difficult to separate truth from fiction. As usual, fantasies are mixed with realities into a disgustingly stinking porridge. Phenomena that are correct (such as your father’s photographic talent) are mixed with sheer falsifications (such as that your father would be a notoriously unfaithful beach flirter). Why do you call your father’s late photos pornography when they were more erotic? Why do you maximize the volume of both the chestnut theme and your father’s late success to such a level that the reader could begin to doubt their correctness? Why do you choose to inject real friends’ names into the meeting in the studio when these were imaginary characters? Why do you let your father repeat the phrase “Like Soyinka said. A tiger does not broadcast its tigership”?

Your text is far from the versions of both truth and compromise, and only in glimpses do you manage to capture your father’s real story. My only explication: You lack adequate talent. You are a miserable make-believe author. You are a
PARASITE
who has exploited your father in order to shape a
FALSE
story. You are a disappointment. You are everything your father has ever accused you of!

My sex- … No, do not even try, I
KNOW
it is called “sixth.” My sixth disappointment was all the unmotivated passages in the book. Why the analysis text about Luke Skywalker and Darth Vader? Why the sudden personal portrait of Félix Bonfils? And why devote a central spread to what you call “My personal hate list.” Who are all these people who are insulted? They are completely unknown to your
father! Why menace a competent female journalist from Norway with the phrase “watch your back, my next book is going to be called
The Book Counterfeiter of Cable TV
and it will be about
YOU
!” And who is the poor male critic at
Svenska Dagbladet
who is first saluted as “the king of autobiographical readings” and then portrayed in repeated erotic scenes, first with an orange and then with a wirehaired dachshund? Suppress this childishness!

BUT
the
ABSOLUTE
worst thing in the book, what is unforgivable and which renders publication of your text
IMPOSSIBLE
, is the terminating epilogue where you write that in preparation for
Montecore
you returned to Tunisia, spent six months in Jendouba, and interviewed your father’s old childhood friends.

You write: “Everyone maintains that Kadir was not only Dad’s best friend from his time at the orphanage. He was also an alcoholic gambling addict who disappeared without a trace one day in the beginning of the nineties. According to the rumors, he hanged himself after a huge poker loss. Is this really true? How did this affect my father? Was it actually this tragic incident that made him go into the deep …”

This is
NOT TRUE!
KADIR LIVES!
KADIR HAS EXCELLENT VIGOR!
Otherwise, who would be writing these letters? It is
NOT
your father who has started a little hotel in Tabarka, it is
NOT
your father who surfs the world net and downloads comedy series. It is
NOT
your father who has started an e-mail address in his former friend’s name with the ambition of rediscovering his relation to his son. It is me, Kadir, who is writing you this.
UNDERSTOOD?

Here is my prescription in order to save this bookly project from its fatal fiasco: Follow my above indications. Replace
ALL
your falseness with my authentic text. Correct any spelling errors. Renovate my grammar. Replace all my
aao
with correct
åäö
. Replace your epilogue with this e-letter.

I do not want any part of your bookly finances. I do not want my name on the cover of the book. All I ask is that you present a tolerably true version of your father’s life.

This will be my farewell.

Your lost friend

Kadir

Jonas Hassen Khemiri, born in Sweden in 1978, is the author of two novels and one collection of plays and short stories. His first novel,
One Eye Red
, received the Borås Tidning Award for best literary debut. His second novel,
Montecore: The Silence of the Tiger
, won several literary awards including the Swedish Radio Award for best novel of the year. Khemiri has also received the PO Enquist Literary Prize for the most promising young European writer. He currently divides his time between Stockholm and Berlin.