The Museum of Eterna's Novel

PROLOGUE TO MY AUTHORIAL PERSONA

The greatest risk one runs in publishing a novel at this stage in life is that nobody knows your age; mine is 73, and I hope that it will rescue me from a potential judgment such as: “For the First Good Novel, it isn’t bad at all, and since it’s the author’s first novel, we predict a brilliant future, if he perseveres in his aesthetic conjurings with strong will and discipline. In any case, we’ll await his future work before rendering a definitive judgment.” With this kind of postponement, I’ll be left out of posterity, and prematurely at that. It’s not flattery at every age when the critics postpone the judgment reserved for novices and squander all confidence on our future.

Moreover, I had planned to publish this novel twenty-two years after the earth completely exhausts its supply of petroleum, because a fortune teller once told me that at the same moment the world will run out of the ample supply of readerly yawns on which we presently rely. Unfortunately, the World Readers Union has promised to take revenge on a certain writer, reserving for him — he just announced his forthcoming work-all the abundant yawns at its disposal and thus severely limiting the available supply for my no less anticipated novel. So you see what good luck it is to be a writer. With this guarantee— which nobody until now has enjoyed — who wouldn’t happily hurl himself into the public eye?

Also I’ve noticed, since becoming an author, how grateful I am to the man who says, “I’ve read everything.” I’m counting on him to come through at an opportune moment, as this melancholy item just appeared in La Razon: “On The Impossibility of Reading Everything.” I’m hurrying to publish my novel so that it may appear before the commencement of this exasperating impossibility.