My secondary disappointment was that you have cracked in the ambition of capturing both your father’s and my linguistic tone. The text you present as Kadir’s if anything makes repeated humor at the expense of Kadir. Is this really the way a person who learned Swedish with your idiotic Swedish rules would write? NO! You exaggerate my grammatical glides. You increase the volume on my linguistic idiosyncrasies. You sprinkle my text with embarrassing metaphors. Why must I constantly refer to deserts and sand dunes? Why do you let me write things like “steaming hot like a hamam” or “she was long-necked and humpy like a camel”? When have I said that Cherifa’s backside was “wide as the Sahara desert”? My metaphors are different and considerably more quality-filled; cultivate these instead. I also find numberous inconsequences in your linguistic attempts. Sometimes you let me say “ask,” sometimes the more advanced “interpellate.” Sometimes “walk,” sometimes “march.” Sometimes “feeling,” sometimes “emotion.” Which are my true words? You who seem to claim that you know?
My triangular disappointment was that your text is sprinkled with repeated factual errors. You spell village names wrong, you are sloppy with numbering the years, you fantasize forth things that never existed (like for example that Emir’s cookie factory had automatic tray turners in the Jendouba of the sixties. HA HA! Very comical. This was first introduced in the seventies.)
You also ascribe bizarrely uncommon names to people. I soon realized, however, that this was more intention than sloppiness. Do you believe I can be duped so easily? Do you think I do not see what is spelled if you read all the letters of the personal names in order? Do you think I will not discover the code that is visualized if one links the introductory letters of your chapters? These fatal attempts at smuggled politics must be suppressed! For the sake of both your future and mine.
My quadratic disappointment was that your text seems amorously enamored with creating comedy that completely lacks humor. Why? Certainly farting camels are a little funny. Once. Or maybe twice. But it is NOT humor to let a farting camel enter your father’s mythic story six times. Suppress all farting camels!
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
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
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.
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