Mandate

This book does not ask for absolution, does not offer a record, and has no vocation to serve as evidence for anyone. It is literature; and, like the best literature, it comes dangerously close to certain things without committing the vulgarity of explaining them completely.

Some will read here only the plot. Some, out of professional deformation or guilt, will want to read more than that and use it in legal proceedings. And there will also be the few who will recognize, behind excessively polished words, old grammars of power: rented legitimacies, patient capital, technical partners, highly composed interests, and third hands with too much appetite for other people's reality.

Whoever looks for a confession will not get one. Whoever looks for innocence will not find that either. Whoever insists on seeing a cipher will, at the very least, have the work of deciphering it alone. I do not confirm anxious readings, nor do I deny troubled consciences.

Not everything here that seems metaphor is one; not everything that seems factual deserves that name. That boundary was not drawn for the reader's comfort, but for the reader's discomfort.

If anyone believes they recognize themselves in these pages, perhaps they should begin by asking themselves why. The book does not call anyone by name...