Book(ART) Book Network

Arturo de Oliveira, writer of several successful detective novels called his editor, Walter Mariot to learn what he thought of his fourth book:
W: Hello?
A: Hi, it’s Arturo, how’s going?
W: Everything ok. When are you sending me the rest of the manuscript?
A: There’s no rest of manuscript, it finishes right there, in page 478.
W: But how about the end of the story? Don’t you know the reader will want to know what happens with investigator Orlando? How about his arch enemy? Someone has to set an end to the atrocities of the villain, or I’m not right?
A: Stephen King always wanted to write a book without an end, but if he cannot write, I can…
W: Only if it is with another editor, my friend – Walter interrupted, the tone of voice rising. Ah, c’mon, it’s not serious, stop cheating, please – he went on, in a conciliatory tone, as one who knows he’s the victim of a joke.
A: This fourth book will be a gift for my readers, stop with the hero journey.
W: The hero journey sells.
A: But this old trick is broadly known, my dearest. You see, the first volume, Orlando and the Tlön mystery, the investigator is induced to an adventure in a typical hero journey. In the second volume, Orlando and the light-giving eternity, I took to the exhaustion the method of the New York’s Actor’s Studio, two narrators, two truths, one reader stuck up to the last paragraph of the last page to know what the true version is. The third volume, Orlando in the Trinity Little Island, I put in action the classical enigma of the murder in the closed room, a murder, several suspects, all stuck in an island. And now, in the fourth volume I lead the reader to another threshold, a story that flows to an astonishing climax and end up abruptly without beating around the bush and without explanations: as an athlete that decides to quit at the top of his career. That’s what’s been missing in the detective novels: vanguardist boldness and strength!
W: Look, Arturo, we have an agreement and will respect it, since you want it to be so… I will forward it to the proofreading.
A: Don’t worry; it will be the great revolution of the modern Brazilian literature!
W: Ok.

***

Arturo and Walter only met again three months later, in the book release, in one of the shops of the Curitiba Bookstores. The author took his novel for the first time, enraptured for the cover neatly worked. He thought the volume to be thick like a Bolaño, his luck numbers, 478. He opened it in the last page to see his numbers again, friends: 657. 657? He looked at his editor. He kept the look. Shot him with the look. Walter cleared his throat and whispered in the ear of Arturo that a ghost writer finished the service. The author took the volume and looked for a comfortable armchair, asked the little girl for a coffee and opened the book in page 478.
— What is this, man are you going to read it now? The guests are coming!
He took the coffee cup, sweetened it, stirred it and took a sip of coffee:
— Ask your ghost writer to come autograph it, because I’m curious to know the end of the story, by the way, will Orlando win his arch enemy or not?