As a young writer, in Prague, I detested the word "generation," whose smell of the herd put me off. The first time I had the sense of being connected to others was later, in France, reading Terra Nostra by Carlos Fuentes. How was it possible that someone from another continent, so distant from me in itinerary and background, should be possessed by the same aesthetic obsession to bring different historical periods to coexist in a novel, an obsession that till then I had naively considered to be mine alone?

Impossible to grasp the nature of the terra nostra, the terra nostra of Mexico, without looking down into the well of the past. Not as a historian would do, in order to see the chronological unfolding of events, but in order to consider: what does the concentrated essence of the Mexican terra mean to a man? Fuentes grasped that essence in the form of a dream novel where various historical periods telescope into a kind of poetic and oneiric metahistory; he thus created something almost indescribable and, in any case, hitherto unknown to literature.

Most recently, I had the same sense of secret aesthetic kinship in Philippe Sollers' La Fete a Venise, that strange novel whose story occurs in our own time but is a stage setting for Watteau, Cezanne, Monet, Titian, Picasso, Stendhal-for the display of their remarks and their art.

And in the meantime came The Satanic Verses: the complicated identity of a Europeanized Indian; terra non nostra; terrae non nostrae; terrae perditae; to grasp that shredded identity, the novel explores it in

different locations on the planet: in London, in Bombay, in a Pakistani village, and then in seventh-century Asia.