The pages of photocopying stop at this point, but for you the only thing that matters now is to continue your reading. Somewhere the complete volume must exist; you look around, seeking it with your gaze, but promptly lose heart; in this office books are considered raw material, spare parts, gears to be dismantled and reassembled. Now you understand Ludmilla’s refusal to come with you; you are gripped by the fear of having also passed over to “the other side” and of having lost that privileged relationship with books which is peculiar to the reader: the ability to consider what is written as something finished and definitive, to which there is nothing to be added, from which there is nothing to be removed. But you are consoled by the faith Cavedagna continues to cherish in the possibility of innocent reading, even here.
Now the elderly editor reemerges from the glass partitions. Grab him by the sleeve, tell him you want to read the rest of Looks down in the gathering shadow.
“Ah, heaven only knows where it’s got to… All the papers in the Marana business have vanished. His typescripts, the original texts, Cimbrian, Polish, French. He’s vanished, everything’s vanished, overnight.”
“And you’ve heard no more from him?”
“No, he wrote… We’ve received many letters… Tales that don’t make any sense … I won’t try to tell them to you, because I wouldn’t know where to begin. I would have to spend hours reading through the entire correspondence.”
“Could I have a look at it?”
Realizing you are determined to see the thing through, Cavedagna agrees to have them bring you the “Marana, Ermes” file from the archives.
“Do you have some free time? Good. Sit here and read. Then you can tell me what you think. Who knows? Maybe you’ll be able to make some sense out of it.”
In writing to Cavedagna, Marana always has some practical reason: to justify his delay in the delivery of the translations, to press for payment of the advances, to point out new foreign publications they shouldn’t let slip through their fingers. But among these normal subjects of business correspondence appear hints of intrigues, plots, mysteries, and to explain these hints, or to explain why he is unwilling to say more, Marana in the end becomes embroiled in increasingly frenzied and garbled volubility.
The letters are addressed from places scattered over five continents, although they never seem to have been entrusted to the normal post, but, rather, to random messengers who mail them elsewhere, so the stamps on the envelopes do not correspond to the countries of provenance. The chronology is also uncertain: there are letters that refer to previous communications, which, however, prove to have been written later; there are letters that promise further explanations, which instead are found in pages dated a week earlier.
“Cerro Negro,” the name—it would seem—of a remote village in South America, appears in the heading of the last letters; but exactly where it is, whether climbing up the Cordillera of the Andes or enshrouded in the forests of the Orinoco, cannot be comprehended from the contradictory glimpses of the landscape that are suggested. The letter you have before you looks like a normal business letter: but how on earth did a Cimmerian-language publishing firm end up down there? And how, if their editions are aimed at the limited market of Cimmerian emigrants in the two Americas, can they publish Cimmerian translations of brand-new books by the most celebrated international authors for which they have the world rights also in the authors’ original languages? The fact remains that
Ermes Marana, who apparently has become their manager, offers Cavedagna an option on the new and eagerly awaited novel In a network of lines that enlace by the famous Irish writer Silas Flannery.
Another letter, again from Cerro Negro, is written, on the contrary, in a tone of inspired evocation: reporting—it seems—a local legend, it tells of an old Indian known as the Father of Stories, a man of immemorial age, blind and illiterate, who uninterruptedly tells stories that take place in countries and in times completely unknown to him. The phenomenon has brought expeditions of anthropologists and parapsychologists; it has been determined that many novels published by famous authors had been recited word for word by the wheezing voice of the Father of Stories several years before their appearance. The old Indian, according to some, is the universal source of narrative material, the primordial magma from which the individual manifestations of each writer develop; according to others, a seer who, thanks to his consumption of hallucinatory mushrooms, manages to establish communication with the inner world of the strongest visionary temperaments and pick up their psychic waves; according to still others he is the reincarnation of Homer, of the storyteller of the Arabian Nights, of the author of the Popol Vuh, as well as of Alexandre Dumas and James Joyce; but there are those who reply that Homer has no need of metempsychosis, since he never died and has continued through the millennia living and composing, the author, besides the couple of poems usually attributed to him, also of many of the most famous narratives known to man. Ermes Marana, putting a tape recorder to the mouth of the cave where the old man hides …
But from a previous letter, this time headed New York, the origin of the unpublished works offered by Marana would seem to be something quite different:
“The headquarters of the OEPHLW, as you see from the letterhead, is in the old Wall Street district. Ever since the business world deserted these austere buildings, their ecclesiastical appearance, inspired by English banks, has become quite sinister. I press a buzzer. ‘It’s Ermes. I’m bringing you the beginning of the Flannery novel.’ They have been waiting for me for some time, since I wired from Switzerland that I had managed to persuade that elderly author of thrillers to entrust to me the beginning of the novel he was unable to continue, assuring him that our computers would be capable of completing it easily, programmed as they are to develop all the elements of a text with perfect fidelity to the stylistic and conceptual models of the author.”
The delivery of those pages to New York was not easy, if we are to believe what Marana writes from a capital in black Africa, giving his adventurous streak free rein:
“We went on, immersed, the plane in a curly cream of clouds, I in the reading of the unpublished work of Silas Flannery, In a network of lines that enlace, precious manuscript lusted after by the international publishing world, which I had daringly taken from the author. And suddenly the mouth of a sawed-off Tommy gun is placed on the bridge of my eyeglasses.
“A commando of armed young people has taken over the plane; the reek of perspiration is unpleasant; I soon realize that their chief objective is the capture of my manuscript. These kids belong to the OAP, surely; but the latest bunch of militants are totally unknown to me; grave, hairy faces and a superior attitude are not characteristics that allow me to distinguish which of the movement’s two wings they belong to.
”… I won’t tell you at length about the puzzled peregrinations of our aircraft, whose route kept bouncing from one control tower to another, inasmuch as no airport
was prepared to receive us. Finally President Butamatari, a dictator with humanistic leanings, allowed the exhausted jet to land on the bumpy runway of his airport, which bordered on the brousse, and he assumed the role of mediator between the extremist commando and the terrified chancelleries of the great powers. For us hostages the days stretch out limp and frayed under a zinc lean-to in the dusty desert. Bluish vultures peck at the ground, pulling out earthworms.”
It becomes clear, from the way he addresses them as soon as he is face to face with them, that there is a bond between Marana and the OAP pirates:
“‘Go home, babies, and tell your boss next time to send more bright-eyed scouts, if he wants to bring his bibliography up to date.’ They look at me with that adenoidal, sleepy expression of agents caught off guard. This sect consecrated to the worship and the unearthing of secret books has ended up in the hands of kids who have only a vague idea of their mission. ‘Who are you?’ they ask me. The moment they hear my name they stiffen. New to the organization, they couldn’t have known me personally, and all they knew about me was the slander circulated after my expulsion: double or triple or quadruple agent, in the service of God knows who and what. Nobody knows that the Organization of Apocryphal Power, which I founded, had a meaning only as long as my control kept it from falling under the sway of unreliable gurus. ‘You took us for those Wing of Light characters, didn’t you?’ they say to me. ‘For your information, we are the Wing of Shadow, and we won’t fall into your traps!’ This was what I wanted to know. I merely shrugged my shoulders and smiled. Wing of Shadow or Wing of Light, for both sides I’m the traitor to be eliminated, but here they can do nothing to me any more, since President Butamatari, who has guaranteed them the right of asylum, has taken me under his protection…”
But why should the OAP hijackers want to get possession of that manuscript? You glance through the papers, seeking an explanation, but you find mostly the bragging of Marana, who gives himself credit for diplomatically arranging the agreement by which Butamatari, having disarmed the commando and got hold of the Flannery manuscript, assures its restitution to the author, asking in exchange that the author commit himself to writing a dynastic novel that will justify the leader’s imperial coronation and his aims of annexing the bordering territories.
“I was the one who proposed the formula of the agreement and conducted the negotiations. Once I introduced myself as the representative of the ‘Mercury and the Muses’ agency, specializing in the advertising and exploitation of literary and philosophical works, the situation took its proper course. Having gained the African dictator’s trust, having regained that of the Celtic writer (by purloining his manuscript, I have saved it from the capture plots devised by various secret organizations), I then found it easy to persuade the parties to accept a contract advantageous for both…”
An earlier letter, headed from Liechtenstein, permits a reconstruction of the preliminary relations between Flannery and Marana: “You must not believe the rumors in circulation, according to which this Alpine principality houses only the administrative and fiscal headquarters of the limited company that holds the copyright and signs the contracts of the fertile, best-selling author, whose personal whereabouts are unknown and whose actual existence is in doubt… I must say that my first encounters, with secretaries who shunted me to attorneys, who shunted me to agents, seemed to confirm your information… The company that exploits this elderly author’s endless verbal production of thrills, crimes, and embraces is structured like an efficient private bank. But the atmo-
sphere reigning there was one of uneasiness and anxiety, as if on the eve of a crash…
“It didn’t take me long to discover the reasons: for several months Flannery has been suffering a crisis. He can’t write a line; the numerous novels he has begun and for which he has been paid advances by publishers all over the world, involving banks and financing on an international level, these novels in which the brands of liquor to be drunk by the characters, the tourist spots to be visited, the haute-couture creations, furnishings, gadgets, have already been determined by contract through specialized advertising agencies, all remain unfinished, at the mercy of this spiritual crisis, unexplained and unforeseen. A team of ghost writers, experts in imitating the master’s style in all its nuances and mannerisms, is ready and waiting to step in and plug the gaps, polish and complete the half-written texts so that no reader could distinguish the parts written by one hand from those by another… (It seems that their contribution has already played a considerable role in our man’s most recent production. ) But now Flannery is telling everybody to wait; he postpones deadlines, announces changes of plan, promises to get back to work as soon as possible, rejects offers of help. According to the more pessimistic rumors, he has started writing a diary, a notebook of reflections, in which nothing ever happens, only moods and the description of the landscape he contemplates for hours from his balcony, through a spyglass…”
In a more euphoric vein the message that, some days later, Marana sends from Switzerland goes: “Make a note of this: where all fail, Ermes Marana succeeds! I have succeeded in speaking with Flannery in person. He was on the terrace of his chalet, watering the potted zinnias. He is a trim, calm old man, pleasant-mannered, as long as he isn’t seized by one of his nervous fits… I could give you a great deal of news about him, valuable for your
publishing activities, and I will do so the moment I receive some token of your interest, via telex to the bank where I have an account whose number I will now give you… .”
The reasons that Marana was impelled to visit the old novelist are not clear from the correspondence: to some extent it seems that he introduced himself as representative of the OEPHLW of New York (Organization for the Electronic Production of Homogenized Literary Works), offering him technical assistance to finish his novel (“Flannery turned pale, trembled, clutched the manuscript to his bosom. ‘No, not that,’ he said, ‘I would never allow it’”); and partly he seems to have gone there to defend the interests of a Belgian writer who had been shamelessly plagiarized by Flannery, Bertrand Vandervelde… But when Marana wrote Cavedagna asking to be put in contact with the writer-recluse, the original idea was apparently to propose, as background for the climactic episodes of his next novel, In a network of lines that enlace, an island in the Indian Ocean “that stands out with its ocher-colored beaches against the cobalt deep.” The proposition was made in the name of a Milanese real-estate investment firm, with a view toward developing the island, creating a village of bungalows purchasable on the installment plan and by correspondence.
Marana’s duties in this firm seem to be connected with “public relations for the development of Developing Countries, with special reference to revolutionary movements, before and after their coming to power, with the aim of procuring and guaranteeing construction permits under the various changes of regime.” In this guise, his first mission was carried out in a sultanate of the Persian Gulf where he was to negotiate the subcontract for the construction of a skyscraper. A fortuitous occasion, connected with his work as a translator, had opened to him
doors normally closed to any European… “The latest wife of the Sultan comes from our country, a woman of sensitive and restless temperament who suffers from the isolation in which she is confined by the geographical position, the local customs, and by court etiquette, though she is sustained by her insatiable passion for reading…” Forced to abandon the novel Looks down in the gathering shadow because of a production defect in her copy, the young Sultana wrote to the translator, protesting. Marana rushed to Arabia. “An old woman, veiled and bleary, motioned me to follow her. In a roofed garden, among the bergamots and the lyrebirds and the jets of fountains, she came toward me, cloaked in indigo, a mask on her face, green silk dotted with white gold, a strand of aquamarines on her brow…”
You would like to know more about this Sultana; your eyes nervously scour the pages of thin airmail paper as if you expected to see her appear at any moment… But it seems that Marana, too, in filling page after page, is moved by the same desire, is pursuing her as she conceals herself… With each letter the story proves more complicated: writing to Cavedagna from “a sumptuous residence at the edge of the desert,” Marana tries to explain his sudden disappearance, telling how the Sultan’s emissaries obliged him by force (or persuaded him with an appetizing contract? ) to move down there, to continue his work, exactly as before… The Sultan’s wife must never remain without books that please her: a clause in the marriage contract is involved, a condition the bride imposed on her august suitor before agreeing to the wedding… After a serene honeymoon in which the young sovereign received the latest works of the major Western literatures in the original languages, which she reads fluently, the situation became tricky… The Sultan fears, apparently with reason, a revolutionary plot. His secret service dis-
covered that the conspirators receive coded messages hidden in pages printed in our alphabet. He decreed an embargo, in effect ever since, and ordered the confiscation of all Western books in his lands. Also, the supplying of his consort’s personal library has been stopped. An innate mistrust—supported, it seems, by specific evidence—leads the Sultan to suspect his wife of conniving with the revolutionaries. But failure to fulfill the famous clause in the marriage contract would bring about a rupture very onerous for the reigning dynasty, as the lady did not hesitate to threaten in the storm of wrath that overwhelmed her when the guards tore from her hands a novel she had barely begun—the one by Bertrand Vandervelde, to be precise.
It was then that the secret service of the sultanate, learning that Ermes Marana was translating that novel into the lady’s native language, persuaded him, with convincing arguments of diverse nature, to move to Arabia. The Sultana receives regularly each evening the stipulated quantity of fictional prose, no longer in the original editions, but in typescript fresh from the translator’s hands. If a coded message were hidden in the succession of words or letters of the original, it would now be irretrievable…
“The Sultan sent for me to ask me how many pages I still have to translate in order to finish the book. I realized that in his suspicions of political-conjugal infidelity, the moment he most fears is the drop in tension that will follow the end of the novel, when, before beginning another, his wife will again be attacked by impatience with her condition. He knows the conspirators are waiting for a sign from the Sultana to fight the fuse, but she has given orders never to disturb her while she is reading, not even if the palace were about to blow up… I have my own reasons for fearing that moment, which could mean the loss of my privileges at court…”
And so Marana proposes to the Sultan a stratagem prompted by the literary tradition of the Orient: he will break off this translation at the moment of greatest suspense and will start translating another novel, inserting it into the first through some rudimentary expedient; for example, a character in the first novel opens a book and starts reading. The second novel will also break off to yield to a third, which will not proceed very far before opening into a fourth, and so on…
Many feelings distress you as you leaf through these letters. The book whose continuation you were already enjoying in anticipation, vicariously through a third party, breaks off again… Ermes Marana appears to you as a serpent who injects his malice into the paradise of reading… In the place of the Indian seer who tells all the novels of the world, here is a trap-novel designed by the treacherous translator with beginnings of novels that remain suspended… just as the revolt remains suspended, while the conspirators wait in vain to begin it with their illustrious accomplice, and time weighs motionless on the flat shores of Arabia… Are you reading or daydreaming? Do the effusions of a graphomane have such power over you? Are you also dreaming of the petroliferous Sultana? Do you envy the lot of the man decanting novels in the seraglios of Arabia? Would you like to be in his place, to establish that exclusive bond, that communion of inner rhythm, that is achieved through a book’s being read at the same time by two people, as you thought possible with Ludmilla? You cannot help giving the faceless lady reader evoked by Marana the features of the Other Reader whom you know; you already see Ludmilla among the mosquito nets, lying on her side, the wave of her hair flowing on the page, in the enervating season of the monsoons, while the palace conspiracy sharpens its blades in silence, and she abandons herself to the flow of reading as if to the sole possible action of life
in a world where only arid sand remains over strata of oily bitumen and the risk of death for reasons of state and the division of sources of energy…
You look through the correspondence again seeking more recent news of the Sultana… You see other female figures appear and disappear:
in the island in the Indian Ocean, a woman on a beach “dressed in a pair of big dark glasses and a smearing of walnut oil, placing between her person and the beams of the dog days’ sun the brief shield of a popular New York magazine.” The issue she is reading publishes in advance the beginning of the new thriller by Silas Flannery. Marana explains to her that magazine publication of the first chapter is the sign that the Irish writer is ready to conclude contracts with firms interested in having brands of whisky appear in the novel, or of champagne, automobile models, tourist spots. “It seems his imagination is stimulated, the more advertising commissions he receives.” The woman is disappointed: she is a devoted reader of Silas Flannery. “The novels I prefer,” she says, “are those that make you feel uneasy from the very first page…”
from the terrace of the Swiss chalet, Silas Flannery is looking through a spyglass mounted on a tripod at a young woman in a deck chair, intently reading a book on another terrace, two hundred meters below in the valley. “She’s there every day,” the writer says. “Every time I’m about to sit down at my desk I feel the need to look at her. Who knows what she’s reading? I know it isn’t a book of mine, and instinctively I suffer at the thought, I feel the jealousy of my books, which would like to be read the way she reads. I never tire of watching her: she seems to live in a sphere suspended in another time and another space. I sit down at the desk, but no story I invent corresponds to what I would like to convey.” Marana asks
him if this is why he is no longer able to work. “Oh, no, I write,” he answered; “it’s now, only now that I write, since I have been watching her. I do nothing but follow the reading of that woman, seen from here, day by day, hour by hour. I read in her face what she desires to read, and I write it faithfully.” “Too faithfully,” Marana interrupts him, icily. “As translator and representative of the interests of Bertrand Vandervelde, author of the novel that woman is reading, Looks down in the gathering shadow, I warn you to stop plagiarizing it!” Flannery turns pale; a single concern seems to occupy his mind: “Then, according to you, that reader … the books she is devouring with such passion are novels by Vandervelde? I can’t bear it…”
in the African airport, among the hostages of the hijacking who are waiting sprawled on the ground, fanning themselves or huddled into the blankets distributed by the hostesses at nightfall, when the temperature dropped suddenly, Marana admires the imperturbability of a young woman who is crouching off to one side, her arms grasping her knees, raised beneath her long skirt to act as lectern; her hair, falling on the book, hiding her face; her hand limply turning the pages as if all that mattered were decided there, in the next chapter. “In the degradation that prolonged and promiscuous captivity imposes on the appearance and the behavior of all of us, this woman seems to me protected, isolated, enveloped as if in a distant moon…” It is then that Marana thinks: I must convince the OAP pirates that the book that made setting up their whole risky operation worthwhile is not the one they have confiscated from me, but this one that she is reading…
in New York, in the control room, the reader is soldered to the chair at the wrists, with pressure manometers and a stethoscopic belt, her temples beneath their crown of hair
held fast by the serpentine wires of the encephalogram that mark the intensity of her concentration and the frequency of stimuli. “All our work depends on the sensitivity of the subject at our disposal for the control tests: and it must, moreover, be a person of strong eyesight and nerves, to be subjected to the uninterrupted reading of novels and variants of novels as they are turned out by the computer. If reading attention reaches certain highs with a certain continuity, the product is viable and can be launched on the market; if attention, on the contrary, relaxes and shifts, the combination is rejected and its elements are broken up and used again in other contexts.” The man in the white smock rips off one encephalogram after another, as if they were pages from a calendar. “Worse and worse,” he says. “Not one novel being produced holds up. Either the programming has to be revised or the reader is not functioning.” I look at the slim face between the blinders and the visor, impassive also because of the earplugs and the chin strap that keeps the jaw from moving. What will her fate be?
You find no answer to this question that Marana lets fall almost with indifference. Holding your breath, you have followed from letter to letter the transformations of the woman reader, as if it were always the same person. But even if they were many persons, to all of them you attribute the appearance of Ludmilla… Isn’t it like her to insist that now one can ask of the novel only to stir a depth of buried anguish, as the final condition of truth which will save it from being an assembly-line product, a destiny it can no longer escape? The image of her naked under the equatorial sun already seems more credible to you than that of her behind the Sultana’s veil, but it could still be a single Mata Hari who moves, pensively, through extra-European revolutions to open the way for the bulldozers of a cement firm… Dispel this image, and receive
that of the deck chair as it comes toward you through the limpid Alpine air. Here you are ready to drop everything: leave, track down Flannery’s hideaway, simply to watch with a spyglass the woman reading or to seek her traces in the diary of the blocked writer… (Or is what tempts you the idea of being able to resume your own reading of Looks down in the gathering shadow, even under another title and signed by another name?) But now Marana transmits more and more distressing news: there she is hostage of hijackers, then prisoner in a Manhattan slum. How did she end up over there, chained to an instrument of torture? Why is she being forced to undergo as a torment what is her natural condition, reading? And what hidden plan makes the paths of these characters cross constantly: she, Marana, the mysterious sect that steals manuscripts?
As far as you are able to gather from hints scattered through these letters, Apocryphal Power, riven by internecine battles and eluding the control of its founder, Ermes Marana, has broken into two groups: a sect of enlightened followers of the Archangel of Light and a sect of nihilist followers of the Archon of Shadow. The former are convinced that among the false books flooding the world they can track down the few that bear a truth perhaps extrahuman or extraterrestrial. The latter believe that only counterfeiting, mystification, intentional falsehood can represent absolute value in a book, a truth not contaminated by the dominant pseudo truths.
“I thought I was alone in the elevator,” Marana writes, again from New York. “Instead a form rises at my side: a youth with hair of arboreal extent had been crouched in a corner, wrapped in clothes of rough canvas. This is not a proper elevator so much as a freight elevator, a cage closed by a folding gate. At every floor a perspective of deserted rooms appears, faded walls with the mark of vanished furniture and uprooted pipes, a desert of moldy
floors and ceilings. Using his red hands with their long wrists, the young man stops the elevator between two floors.
“‘Give me the manuscript. We’re the ones you have brought it to, not the others. Even if you were thinking the opposite. This is a true book, even if its author has written so many false ones. So it comes to us.’
“With a judo movement he knocks me to the floor and seizes the manuscript. I realize at this moment that the young fanatic is convinced he is holding the diary of Silas Flannery’s spiritual crisis and not the outline of one of his usual thrillers. It’s amazing how prompt these secret sects are to pick up any piece of news, whether true or false, that coincides with their expectations. Flannery’s crisis had aroused the two rival factions of Apocryphal Power and, with opposing hopes, they had unleashed their informers in the valleys around the novelist’s chalet. The Wing of Shadow people, knowing that the great fabricator of assembly-line novels was no longer able to believe in his tricks, had convinced themselves that his next novel would mark the switch from cheap and relative bad faith to essential and absolute bad faith, the masterpiece of falsity as knowledge, and would therefore be the book they had been seeking for such a long time. The Wing of Light followers, on the other hand, thought that from the crisis of such a professional in falsehood only a cataclysm of truth could be born, and this is what they believed the writer’s diary of which there was so much talk would be… At the rumor, circulated by Flannery, that I had stolen an important manuscript from him, each side identified the manuscript with the object of its search, and both set out to find me, the Wing of Shadow causing the hijacking of the plane, the Wing of Light that of the elevator…
‘The arboreal young man, having hidden the manuscript in his jacket, slipped out of the elevator, slammed
the gate in my face, and is now pressing the button to make me disappear downward, after hurling a final threat at me: ‘The score with you isn’t settled, Agent of Mystification! We still have to liberate our Sister chained to the machine of the Counterfeiters!’ I laugh as I slowly sink. There is no machine, kiddo. It’s the Father of Stories who dictates our books!’
“He brings the elevator back up. ‘Did you say the Father of Stories?’ He has turned pale. For years the followers of the sect have been searching for the old blind man, across all the continents, where his legend is handed down in countless local variants.
‘“Yes, go tell that to the Archangel of Light! Tell him I’ve found the Father of Stories! I have him in my hands, and he’s working for me! Electronic machine, my foot!’ And now I’m the one who presses the down button.”
At this point three simultaneous desires are competing in your soul. You would be ready to leave immediately, cross the ocean, explore the continent beneath the Southern Cross until you can find the latest hiding place of Ermes Marana and wrest the truth from him, or at least get from him the continuations of the interrupted novels. At the same time you want to ask Cavedagna if he can immediately let you read In a network of lines that enlace by the pseudo (or genuine?) Flannery, which might also be the same thing as Looks down in the gathering shadow by the genuine (or pseudo?) Vandervelde. And you can’t wait to run to the café where you are to meet Ludmilla, to tell her the confused results of your investigation and to convince yourself, by seeing her, that there can be nothing in common between her and the women readers encountered around the world by the mythomane translator.
The last two desires are easily satisfied, and are not mutually exclusive. In the café, waiting for Ludmilla, you begin to read the book sent by Marana.