The fourth volume of essays, Don't Make Yourself at Home, Friend, contains two texts whose common theme is the novelist's reflection on the novelist. His relationship to the lyric ("the novelist is born on the ruins of his lyric world"). His basic disagreement with the "pre-interpretation of life" (mythological, religious or ideological). The passionate defence of copyright, with which the very emergence of the art of the novel is linked in the figure of Cervantes. The morality of the essential, which removes from the work of life everything that is irrelevant ('life is short, reading is long, and literature kills itself with mad fertility'). The stupidity of those who seek the meaning of the novel in the author's biography (Proust's polemic against Sainte-Beuve). And so on. And so on.
Czech Edition