Dossier K: A Memoir

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The conversation that I conducted with my friend and editor Zoltán Hafner over the course of 2003 and 2004 by way of a so-called “in-depth” interview filled maybe a dozen magnetic tapes. A file containing a transcript of the edited material caught up with me at my hotel in the little Swiss town of Gstaad. Having looked through the first few sentences, I set the bundle of the manuscript to one side, and with what one might call an involuntary movement opened the lid to my computer … That is how this book came into being — the only one of my books that I have written more because of external prompting than out of any inner compulsion: a veritable autobiography. If one acknowledges Nietzsche’s proposition that the prototype of the novel as an art form was to be found in the Platonic dialogues, then the Reader is in fact holding a novel in his or her hands.

I. K.

In Fiasco you write: “When I was fourteen and a half, through a conjunction of infinitely inane circumstances, I found myself looking down the barrel of a loaded machine gun for half an hour.” I suppose that must have happened in the barracks of the gendarmerie. Why was that episode left out of Fatelessness?

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