As we have a good relationship with the neighbors, we leave them the key to the house when we go on vacation. This way, your summer visits can stay in our house. On the return of the holiday, in the refrigerator we find the minimum food and, on the kitchen table, the weeklies that have come home to us while we were out. I have to look through that bumpy bit before I get to work. It is a senseless habit turned into a ritual. The day after I got home, I can't go on living like there was no rest. The words printed in the weekly papers are the way to recover the time of Berlin that I have lost while I’ve been in the other place (in my hometown). They are tidings for a space of time that has not existed for me.

The least is to want to follow the thread of everyday issues; everything else is what interests me the most. For example, I have read in a column that it is appropriate to rest a little the one who writes a novel and that, during that time, he has to read something other than the one he wrote. That's exactly what I've done in summer. The columnist says that the writer who writes the novel should be careful, because the author who chooses to read will influence his work after the rest. He is right, of course, reading can set a new place to look at what he is writing. Maybe it makes you doubt everything. Again!

The columnist focused on Karl Ove Knausgard for his rest; I started the summer with the other Norwegian, Tomás Espedal. The two write without resorting to fiction, but according to the unanimity of those who read them, each count more than they count. I started the summer falling in love with Espedal's writing. It's a poetic prose, free, transparent. She rarely falls in love with someone's writing, and it's worth enjoying that feeling. It's a totally rewarding, intimate, profound experience. As with a person who has fallen in love with us, there is a desire more like addiction, a need more. So, after reading one Espedal, I had to give an answer to the need to buy another one immediately. I had stayed to go to the movies and, fortunately, along the way, I found it in the third bookstore, a cheap copy with a soft lid.

As the rest I've taken from writing was quite long, I've had time to read more. I put Paul Auster's last one in the suitcase, in the electronic reader. Auster tells four versions of Archie Ferguson's biography. Play on the board of inflection points that make a life turn here or there. Some events are dramatic, especially deaths from war or accident. Most decisions, achievements, failures are so modest that they go unnoticed. The boundary between the experiences of one class and another is not always clear. All of them are the starting point of fiction, material.

Speaking of my cheats to resume everyday life, I can think of it if Espedal, without having to put everything upside down, will influence the writing of my novel. It wouldn't be wrong. And if so, who would the achievement, yours or mine be from? If I had opened the door of Knausgard in the literary maze instead of that of Espedal? During rest, as the head is not off, it should be lost occasionally in activities that are not work.