Anton‘s Bark - Nine

The Otto Loser Mysteries

Today, Otto reads Chapter Seven for us. This is the last chapter Anton had been writing before he disappeared altogether. In this chapter the fictional Otto remains amorphous, somewhere in his memory. But he soon emerges, not quite into the Spitzenhof café again, but into Father Promentano’s operatic version of it. Otto’s reflections, following his reading of this chapter, centre on problems of the ‘self’. This is a conundrum, given that his own origins are to be found in a series of mystery novels. On this question, Otto explains that he has long believed himself to be an ‘automaton’, without the capacity to choose. While he was still a lawyer in England, the fictional Otto had been in a position to write a book about this. He completed the book before his fictional self was destined to return to Vienna. What the real Otto comes to realise about himself, and his written fate, no to mention Anton’s own passage through the Unseen, is that by stepping into the cave, the missing writer of Otto in Flames would go onto trigger an ‘intensification of the phenomenon of all possibilities’. This intensification includes some bizarre ways of drafting Chapter Eight.