The Island of Second Sight

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All the people in this book are alive or were at one time. Yet they appear here, the author included, in dual cognizance of their personality, and therefore they can be held responsible neither for their actions nor for any assumptions that might arise in the reader’s mind. Just as my ego-deprived characters appear subject to greater or lesser degrees of personal disjuncture, similarly the sequence of events has undergone chronological rearrangements that can even involve the obliteration of all sense of time.

In case of doubt, let truth be told.

It would mean commencing this chronicle fictitiously if I were to try now, twenty years after the event, to ascertain which wily fiend plagued me more sorely during that nocturnal ocean voyage: the man-eating common flea inside the sleeping bag I borrowed from a sailor, or the horrendous nightmare that whisked me back to the Nicolas Beets Straat in Amsterdam, where the grave had just closed over a young woman whose cause of death I, her renegade lover’s double, had somehow become.

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