Dear Marion,

Unless I'm summoned to some airport or other by a tempestuous alarm,
my days often begin in a twilight of consciousness, with new ideas
chirping and twittering in my mind like birds before sunrise on a
summer morning. This time I saw the personages of Micha's novel,
Abe Zandsta, Esther Landau, Fritz Jacobi, Yehudi Sonnenschein,
Sydney Greenhut, Miriam Greenhut, Herman Hombers, and above all Eve
Hombers, - what kind of insecticide did Micha use, to get rid of all
the wasps, and where did he find it? - If Knut Hamsun had been a Jew,
isn't this the novel he would have written, describing us humans as
the characters we really are, instead of anointing us with the sugar
coating of pious idealism like one would-be novelist I happen to know?
The fate of Abe himself, who was ultimately arrested for a crime he
committed, if at all, only in his imagination, - or perhaps as vicarious
punishment for the adultery he did commit, an unmistakable echo of
Kafka's "K"s who met a similar fate in der Prozess. All this supported
as with a basso continuo by the false romanticism of Joseph Freiherr von
Eichendorff, fake in English, fake in Dutch, but fake above all, in German.
I've read only about 40 percent of the text; I thought it had the making
of a great novel. Or is it the reader that by his understanding
consummates the greatness of a novel? That, at least, would be the
argument of Jonathan Mengs (Die Andere, Chapter 1) who thought that
like the Bible, all literature was made ultimately meaningful only by
the "faith" of the reader, i.e. by the projection onto the text of the
reader's own experience.

Last evening, after I had driven Margrit to the Thai Restaurant, I
snooped through her papers which were strewn helter skelter not only
in her room, but in the kitchen as well.  The printout of her itinerary
from her travel agent showed that on December 1, she had confirmed her
reservations for the Detroit-Fort Lauderdale flight on December 12.
On her engagement calendar she had crossed out the fly to Tri Cities
entry on December 8.  There was a new "fly to Detroit" entry for December 9,
but no indication of the time or the airline. I assume she will ask me
to drive her to the airport, - if she remembers. Right now Margaret and
Margrit are outside raking leaves. The atmosphere is civil but sombre.
Margaret is saddened by the illnesses of her siblings. Her brother Alex, -
with whom I roomed in college, has just been hospitalized for dyspnea
secondary to pulmonary embolism possibly caused by cancer-linked
hypercoagulability, Alex's wife Winnie has just had cancer surgery.
Margaret's sister Janet is troubled by moderately severe asthma.
My own sister is proud of her resilience and good health, and anyone
who mentioned that she had just survived bowel resection for incarcerated
femoral hernia and had not yet recovered from Clostridium difficile diarrhea,
she would scold as being negative and a cynic.

If our correspondence were not so voluminous, I would review what you
have written and quote to you the statements which I interpret as your
opinion to the effect that a detached and factual account of my sister
is incompatible with my purported affection for her: that if I describe
what I see and understand, I am critical, if I am critical, my affection
for her is feigned and dishonest, that if I describe what I understand,
I am hostile to her, and if I am hostile to her, she has every reason
to retreat into the Detroit battle zone, and if she perishes there,
it will be my fault. Conversely, if I were truly fond of Margrit,
I would enlist my logical and literary talents to corroborate the high
opinion of herself which she would like the world to have. My contention,
on the other hand, is that there is no future in spiritual cosmesis,
that to see, to respect, and to love one another as we are, unembroidered
and unadorned, is the mark of the highest esteem, and the ultimate gift
we are able to give.

Jochen