Quite early in life - I was born in 1944 - I got interested in reading books. I soon developed a taste for good novels like those writ by Jane Austen, Joseph Conrad, Virginia Woolf and Melville, just to mention a few. Since I am a Swede and I was brought up in Sweden and I read all the classics of my own country, like the masterpieces of Strindberg and Almqvist, both of them giants when it comes to dense, thrilling, prose in Swedish. I later discovered Kafka, and with him the vast literature of ambiguity and of romantic irony. It was around 1968 when I already had studied History of Arts, Philosophy and General Literature in Gothenburg. Those days I was living in a small, worn flat in the centre of this town and my eyes had in an antiquarian´s fallen upon a small used volume by Kafka in German, the novel Amerika . I was already familiar with The Metamorphosis , in Swedish translation. I then started out with my small Ge...