Collected Prose

couldn’t see any purpose in recounting such a bleak, miserable saga.
    Then, two or three months after I finished my book, something extraordinary happened. About a year before, I had accepted an invitation to go to San Francisco to appear in the City Arts and Lectures Series at the Herbst Theatre. The event was scheduled for October 1996, and when the moment came, I climbed onto a plane and flew to San Francisco as promised. After my business onstage was finished, I was supposed to sit in the lobby and sign copies of my books. The Herbst is a large theater with many seats, and the line in the lobby was therefore quite long. Among all those people waiting for the dubious privilege of having me write my name in one of my novels, there was someone I recognized—a young man I had met once before, the friend of a friend. This young man happens to be a passionate collector of books, a bloodhound for first editions and rare, out-of-the-way items, the kind of bibliographic detective who will think nothing of spending an afternoon in a dusty cellar sifting through boxes of discarded books in the hope of finding one small treasure. He smiled, shook my hand, and then thrust a set of bound galleys at me. It had a red paper cover, and until that moment, I had never seen a copy of it before. “What’s this?” he said. “I never heard of it.” And there it was, suddenly sitting in my hands: the uncorrected proofs of my long-lost translation. In the big scheme of things, this probably wasn’t such an astonishing event. For me, however, in my own little scheme of things, it was overwhelming. My hands started to tremble as I held the book. I was so stunned, so confused, that I was scarcely able to speak.
    The proofs had been found in a remainder bin at a secondhand bookstore, and the young man had paid five dollars for them. As I look at them now, I note with a certain grim fascination that the pub date announced on the cover is April 1981. For a translation completed in 1976 or 1977, it was, truly, an agonizingly slow ordeal.
    If Pierre Clastres were alive today, the discovery of this lost book would be a perfect happy ending. But he isn’t alive, and the brief surge of joy and incredulity I experienced in the atrium of the Herbst Theatre has by now dissipated into a deep, mournful ache. How rotten that the world should pull such tricks on us. How rotten that a person with so much to offer the world should die so young.
    Here, then, is my translation of Pierre Clastres’s book, Chronicle of the Guayaki Indians . No matter that the world described in it has long since vanished, that the tiny group of people the author lived with in 1963 and 1964 has disappeared from the face of the earth. No matter that the author has vanished as well. The book he wrote is still with us, and the fact that you are holding that book in your hands now, dear reader, is nothing less than a victory, a small triumph against the crushing odds of fate. At least there is that to be thankful for. At least there is consolation in the thought that Pierre Clastres’s book has survived.

    1997

The National Story Project

    I never intended to do this. The National Story Project came about by accident, and if not for a remark my wife made at the dinner table sixteen months ago, most of the pieces in this book never would have been written. It was May 1999, perhaps June, and earlier that day I had been interviewed on National Public Radio about my most recent novel. After we finished our conversation, Daniel Zwerdling, the host of Weekend All Things Considered , had asked me if I would be interested in becoming a regular contributor to the program. I couldn’t even see his face when he asked the question. I was in the NPR studio on Second Avenue in New York, and he was in Washington, D.C., and for the past twenty or thirty minutes we had been talking to each other through microphones and headsets, aided by a technological marvel known as fiber optics. I asked him what he had in mind, and he said that he wasn’t sure. Maybe I could come on the air every month or so and tell stories.
    I wasn’t interested. Doing my own work was difficult enough, and taking on a job that would force me to crank out stories on command was the last thing I needed. Just to be polite, however, I said that I would go home and think about it.
    It was my wife, Siri, who turned the proposition on its head. That night, when I told her about NPR’s curious offer, she immediately