The Best Book in the World

CHAPTER 12

The ABC Method


Competition is not a whip that usually cracks behind Titus. But when it does finally sing through the air in Titus’ flat, it sends his adrenaline levels sky high.

Now it is a matter of ping-pong. There is no time to play tactically and plan in detail. No, what he must do is smash every ball that comes his way. Since he has a good overview of the plot of the book in his head, he can allow himself to churn out the various chapters in any order. Then he can cut and paste.

He blow-starts the computer and savours a brilliant idea:

The ABC Method.

The very thought of the perfect slimming method made Chief Inspector H?kan Rink’s body so exalted that he burnt 100 calories. Never before had anyone packaged slimming tricks in such a smart and concise manner as he had done. Never ever had the advice been so simple and candid. And besides, he himself was living proof that the system worked. In only five weeks, he had lost ten kilograms. And he had just passed the ‘ogling threshold’, the magical eighty-two-kilo boundary. The ogling threshold was the perfect measure of a person’s ideal weight, and it was much more reliable than the tired old BMI value which only measures the relationship between weight and height. Weight and height are of no interest to mankind in the long term. The only thing that counts is if and when you can mate. And BMI has no say in that. The ogling threshold, however, puts the focus on more natural instincts.

Eighty-two kilograms: that was the boundary when women yet again started to meet H?kan Rink’s eye. They hadn’t done that for ten years. Before, when he weighed more than ninety kilograms, there wasn’t a single soul who eyed him up. But now that he weighed a little below eighty-two, at least one or two gave him an appreciative smile. In the reflection in a shop window, he had even noticed how a girl raised her sunglasses and sneaked a look at his arse. To be objectified – that was a wonderful feeling that H?kan Rink wanted to experience more often. Besides, people had started to listen to him at work in a new way. They took him seriously again. Now he was competent as a mating partner and transporter of human genes. As such, that made him credible as the leader of the flock.

The ABC Method

A: Abstain from all food in the evenings

B: Brown carbohydrates only

C: Crisps and sweets forbidden at all times



It wasn’t any harder than that, H?kan Rink thought. He could see the straight and narrow (or slim) path that lay wide open before him. He would now achieve miracles. Now he would catch Serial Salvador. Now perhaps he would even be able to lose his nickname. He was sick to his back teeth with being called Detective Hockey-Rink.

Is he good, or is he good? Thousands of slimming books can go to hell. Millions of magazine and newspaper articles can go and hide in the corner. The ABC-method, the best slimming method in the world, fits on a postcard, Titus thinks quietly, and closes the lid of the laptop.

He wonders about Eddie X. How far has he got? Can that man really write about anything other than love?

Titus is reminded of an article about positive and negative energy that he read some years ago. A team of scientists had compared the ability of people to solve difficult problems. One group that was studied comprised people who used positive thinking and liked to work with target images. Those people saw the final reward as the best way to provide motivation for success. When you know why you should succeed, then you will succeed. This positive method is often used by athletes. The other group was the pessimists. As soon as they were given a task they became grumpy and started looking for problems. What were the obstacles that would prevent them from succeeding? When was the most likely time the whole thing would get screwed up? In their workplaces they were often called whiners. For the pessimists, it was completely rational to think about failure from the very first. It was a matter of mapping out and evaluating the problems before they started work. The results of the study were very interesting. Both groups succeeded well with their tasks. It transpired that optimists and pessimists were just as good at achieving good results. The important thing was to find the method that best suited one’s character. An optimist gets terrified if you talk about problems instead of faith, hope and love; a pessimist is suspicious of anything not based on facts.

Titus remembers how liberating he thought this study was. There was just as much hope for the coal-black prophets of woe as there was for the warbling optimists. At the same time, it was tiring to think about how well these ridiculous self-help books sold, and how much all the optimist consultants earned. Why was that so? Who had even heard of a multi-millionaire who had got rich by claiming that everything gets screwed up? It must be because the optimists have access to the media, and that the pessimists are discriminated against. At a guess, the pessimists earn a fraction of the salary of the optimists even though they do just as good a job. Equal wages for unequal mouths! That should be the slogan.

Titus is determined to do everything in his power to confirm the study. He is going to be literature’s Cathy Freeman: a feted pessimist at the kernel of optimism. The aboriginal and asthmatic runner from Australia dominated the 400-metre tracks around the turn of the century, and harvested lots of Olympic and World Championship medals. She belonged to the indigenous population that had been declared incapable of running their own country and had been cowed by the white colonial optimists for hundreds of years. Every time she won, she looked a bit uncomfortable because the next time she would probably screw it up. Why celebrate with the public now? At the next competition, all those white teeth would scornfully laugh when she lost. But perhaps, perhaps, she could nevertheless be able to try again. If only she prepared a bit better, trained a bit more intensively, a bit longer, a bit more often.

Preparation and facts make for proficiency. Since I am basically a gloomy pessimist, I must devote myself to facts, Titus thinks. The Best Book in the World shall be written with the best research in the world.

The boy at the woman’s bosom may well be a positive and fine image to quickly counter the craving for poison.

But if the sceptic didn’t get more nourishment, it would all get screwed up.