Dear Mr. M by Herman Koch Read Free Book Online

here, you know well enough how it goes. That first sentence wasn’t there on the first eighteen editions, it was added only for the film version. But it’s been on every edition ever since. The book has been molded to fit the movie. A movie that differs from the book on a few essential points. Just as your book differs from reality on a few essential points. From the real events on which it’s based.
    Those latter differences are understandable enough. You ran into a few blank spots that your imagination had to fill in. And I must say: Hats off! You got awfully close.
    But not close enough.
    How would you like to have the chance to fill in those blanks all over again? A revised edition of
Payback
in which the unsettled questions are settled at last? If I were a writer, I wouldn’t be able to resist the temptation.
    It was a little less than a year ago that you moved in upstairs. That would never be possible in a novel. Writer moves into apartment above…well, above what? A character? No, I’m not one of your characters. I’m a flesh-and-blood human being on whom a writer has loosely based a character. In a novel, it would be completely implausible. Too much of a coincidence. Coincidence undermines a story’s credibility.
    There’s only one area in which we accept coincidence, and that is in reality. “Such a coincidence!” we say, and then we dish up a juicy anecdote in which coincidence plays a major role.
    Conversely, you could say that the coincidence that has made us neighbors is only plausible because it takes place in the real world.
    You could never come up with that yourself, people say. At least, a writer never would.
    I remember so clearly the afternoon when I went to see the movie version of
Payback
. There weren’t very many people in the theater, it was a matinee. I remember the moment when the high-school students appeared on screen for the first time. The boy takes the girl by the arm.
    “I want you to know that I care about you more than anyone else in the world,” he says, and I couldn’t help laughing at such a totally unnatural and implausible line, spoken by an even more implausible actor—the kind of actor you see only in Dutch feature films. I laughed so loudly that I was hissed at from all corners of the darkened theater.
    People read a book and imagine the faces themselves. Then they go to the movie version and the imaginary face is destroyed by the face of the actor on the silver screen.
    With me, that was totally different. In both the book and the movie, I kept seeing the same face.
    My own.

The postcard came this morning. A postcard…there’s something touching about that, something from days gone by. The same days gone by to which you belong, where your roots lie, you might say.
    You yourself are all too pleased to make a show of those days gone by. In interviews you never fail to emphasize your lack of confidence in modern inventions. Computers, the Internet, e-mail, cell phones—all things you keep at bay.
    “My wife does all my e-mails, I’m too old to start in on that.”
    “Sometimes I hear the cell-phone conversations people carry on in the train and I ask myself whether we’ve made any real progress since the days of the Neanderthal.”
    “I write the first version in longhand, then I type it over. On an old-fashioned typewriter, yes. I tried it once, writing on a computer, but had the feeling right away that I was checking in passengers at an airport. Or working at the local branch office of a bank.”
    Every once in a while you go too far with it, and the coyness shines through. Like when you cast doubt on the sense of electronically amplified guitars.
    “Why for God’s sake does a guitar need to be amplified? When I hear it, I always have the sneaking suspicion that the guitarist isn’t really technically competent, that he’s trying to mask that by making as much noise as possible.”
    Who are you trying to impress with comments like that? Probably those