Justine

“I too was very busy. Thinking. I had decided to write a novel. It would be a big book, Tolstoyan in scale, Joycean in its ambition, Shakespearean in its lyricism. Twenty years hence, the book would be the subject of graduate seminars and doctoral dissertations. The book would join the Canon of Literature. Students would speak reverentially of the text, my text, in hushed, wondrous tones. Magazine profiles would begin with The reclusive literary giant J. Maarten Troost . . . I had already decided to be enigmatic, a mystery. People would speak of Salinger, Pynchon, and Troost. I wondered if I could arrange my citizenship so that I would win both the Booker and the Pulitzer for the same book. To get in the right state of mind, I read big books—Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie, Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace, Ulysses by James Joyce (okay, I skimmed parts of that one). I read King Lear. Inexplicably, Sylvia thought I was procrastinating. And”
― J. Maarten Troost, The Sex Lives of Cannibals