How I wrote Hadrian's memoires

Still enjoying Voltaire. What a style! I envy, envy him. Studied Latin and Greek/ maybe I am a probably soft and prone to roman architecture of language. Not to mention I was brought up in the family where kids, including my father, were thought French from early childhood, before WWII.

I don't speak French, except some love French, we all have to know, as we have to be good in English to use technology or Italian to enjoy pasta.

Need to say my personal library is fairly packed with equal number of French and English writers, Americans are on the separate floor - they are dangerous, Latin Americans are partying in the penthouse all the time, Serbian writers live on the ground floor to meet and greet foreigners in our part of the world. Russians play chess in the salon and occasionally have firearms duels in he woods. Afraid to follow them to the woods, I carefully enjoy this vintage gents stories on paper / loving Puskin madly. In fact, all of the writers inhabiting my mental haven make my face pale and my heart trembling with fear, from time to time!

Those deeply personal favorites I take everywhere with me/ from kitchen to bedroom.

Conrad, V.Hugo, Lispector, Cortasar, Duras, Coetzee, D.W. Foster, Ballard, Lispector, Pynchon, S.F. Fitzgerald, Blok, Bartelmi, Twain, Cvetaeva, Carlyle, Simone Weil and many, many more.

Once we played game in the office , choosing which writer we would like to be, meaning the classic book we would like to be written by us. Well, I killed other competitors/ choosing for myself Hadrian's memoirs by Marguerite Yourcenar.

The rest was silence in the office!

This has to do with that ghostly, cannibalistic quality of literature - like baying typing machine used by some famous writer, pilgrimage to places where our hero was drinking, living and writing, or this little game we played in the office. I almost can't describe how joyous this game was and all fellow journalists took part in it with same deep, serious thinking.

Well, my inner vampire got the first prize!

So, my favorite authors- watch yourself.