"Two years later, I finished a book, but not "the" book... I woke up one day to realize that I had written a book which ended in 1923, a turning-point in the story... I was faced with a problem; 1923 was too far from 1945 to make up a plausible alibi. I could not expect anyone else to know what the significance of 1923 was and why it had become my stopping-point. Yet, somehow, without intending it, I had produced a book on the formative period of the formative period; it had a beginning, a middle, and an end; it was a book I knew, if the wrong one."