Dear Mr. M by Herman Koch

seems like it will never end. The next day they call all their girlfriends. “You’ll never guess who stayed over at my place last night…”
    Today M is fairly lucky. The library where he’s expected to turn up is within walking distance, in a neighborhood at the edge of his own town. The worst thing about giving a reading in Amsterdam is the audiences. The audiences here radiate a certain self-importance, to put it mildly. What they radiate above all is the fact that they could be attending so many other, perhaps even much more interesting performances, matinees, or concerts. Still, on this sunny Saturday, they are here, with you, in the library. They’re raring to go, but make no mistake about it: they’re not about to settle for the same old song and dance, not like those provincial bumpkins who, for lack of a richer cultural agenda, go gladly to see an older, visibly dwindling writer.
    At the door to the library he is welcomed by a woman who introduces herself as Anke or Anneke, or something like that. He didn’t really catch the name, or rather: his hearing picked up the vowels and consonants in a certain sequence and sent them on to his brain, but upon arrival they all fell apart, like some appliance or machine you’ve stripped down despite your better judgment—a toaster, the engine block of a moped—but then can’t put back together for the life of you.
    Anna (Agnes? Anneke? Anke?) extends a hand—it’s a dry hand; he glances down at his fingers to see whether there are flakes of eczema sticking to them.
    What is it with these lady librarians?
he asks himself, not for the first time, as he follows her past endless rows of borrowed-to-tatters, dog-eared, and therefore totally unappetizing books.
Why do they all wear their hair the same way?
He has nothing against women with short hair. On the contrary. Short hair, even a crew cut, can look splendid on a woman. But this isn’t like that. This is
easy
hair, easy to keep up, like a front yard full of paving stones rather than a lawn.
    The library itself is one of those responsibly renovated buildings, everything dressed in a motley (low-threshold!) newness meant to seduce readers into doing their book-borrowing here; the same way the churches tried, not so very long ago, to draw in unbelievers with pop music during the services. In the olden days libraries were merely dusty, he thinks, introverted. Today they all do their best to look like airport departure halls.
    “Do you have any objection to signing during the intermission, and after the reading?” the librarian asks; they’ve stopped in a corridor hung with posters and bulletin board notices.
    How could he have any objections to that? That’s what he’s here for, isn’t it? Why do they always ask that?
    “And would you like to stand or sit?” she goes on. “We have a table and a rostrum, so you can choose. Do you use a microphone? What would you like to drink during the reading?”
    He looks again at the librarian’s easy hair. When you stop to think about it, it’s simply a slap in the face, walking around like that. There’s no need to have one’s hair cut in the ugliest possible fashion. But “have one’s hair cut” seems the wrong way to put it too. Far more likely that she wields the shears herself. That’s cheaper.
What do I care how I look,
they say to themselves and the outside world. Then they attack their hair with the scissors.
    Suddenly he feels exhausted. The rest of the afternoon stretches out before him like an empty plot of land without trees or buildings, a vacant lot beyond the reach of any zoning ordinance. The female librarian has asked him a number of questions, one after the other. He’s already forgotten the first and second ones. They usually ask these questions much earlier on. They call you three to five months in advance. He used to answer the questions himself. Microphone. Sit/stand. Drink. Sign. For the last few years, though, his wife has done that for