This text was written based on a extract of the book of Paul Auster, The Red Notebook . The extract of the book will be written in brown and in italic.

The Red Notebook (2002), Paul Auster

In 1972 a close friend of mine ran into trouble with the law. She was in Ireland that year, living in a small village not far from the town of Sligo. As it happened, I was visiting on the day a plainclothes detective drove up to her cottage and presented her with a summons to appear in court. The charges were serious enough to require a lawyer. My friend asked around and was given a name, and the next morning we bicycled into town to meet with this person and discuss the case. To my astonishment, he worked for a firm called Argue and Phipps.

This is a true story. If there are those who doubt me, I challenge them to visit Sligo and see for themselves if I have made it up or not. I have reveled in these names for the past twenty years, but even though I can prove that Argue and Phibbs were real men, the fact that one name should have been coupled with the other (to form an even more delicious joke, an out-and-out sendup of the legal profession) is something I still find hard to believe.

According to my latest information (three or four years ago), the firm continues to do a thriving business.

The following year (1973), I was offered a job as caretaker of a farmhouse in the south of France. My friend’s legal troubles were well behind her, and since our on-again off-again romance seemed to be on again, we decided to join forces and take the job together.

The next paragraphs are written by myself, based on the extract that you read just before.

We didn’t know that what had happened one year before would pursue us in our new iob. We never heard about the story of the firm Argue and Phibbs as had been a dream. We have thought that all of that was beyond us, but we were wrong.

The reality came again to hit us and this time, it was I who was suspected. Someone in the place we lived in was killed and the situation was similar to what happened to my friend.

She was suspected because a witness had seen her outside at the place and at the hour (approximatively) when the victim was killed. My friend, Katharine, was surprised when the detective came to her home and tried to prove that she hadn’t murdered that man. Unfortunately, the gun which was used to commit the crime was found with the digital prints of my friend on it. For that reason, my friend was totally scared and started to think that she was the murderer but forgot everything about what she had done. I was convinced that she was the victim here like the dead and I did my best to reassure her. Finally, my friend was released because they didn’t have enough proofs to incriminate her. But, in her mind, the story was still clear, so she decided never to come back to this town with so many bad memories for her.

I was very happy to find this job as caretaker and I didn’t think when I invited her to join me, the past would repeat itself. A man was also killed, and in this case also, everyone tried to find out who the murderer could be, arguing that was the first time that something like that happened in their village. I was seen the day of the murder walking near of M. Cardwell’s house, the most important person of the village. It could have been a suicide but unluckily for me, my digital prints were found on the knife used for the murder. I wanted to exonerate myself, so I explained to the policemen that the same story had happened one year before.