2. Structure & Texture & Content

      Sprung from its lengthened title, the novel goes thru this here Foreword, sort of, to be followed by the epigraph—curt, but to the point—and then flows into the narration of not excessive terseness—4 books, all in all—where some passages might arise reasonable doubts whether my pledge of the forthcoming truth was made in good faith.

      So again: my objective is keeping true to life as close as I can. But then, not every truth is met with a warm hug, there’s no guarantee from someone tossing up their back and yelling, “Bullshit! Not a chance of selling that to me!” My most amicable, immediate advice to hard-duty skeptics is to put The Rascally Romance off until they, hopefully, got it that even truth can have, now and then, surprises up its sleeve to make a Holy Cow or 2 moo and moo from envy. And if the truth of this here observation stays dim for some obtuse dunce, then it’s my turn to envy their blest innocence.

      The text flow assumed for this work follows the simplistic block style of separate paragraphs, episodes, parts, and books to make reading engagingly easy. At times you come across a little bit deeper aligned stretches started with “(…” and concluded by “…)”, as follows:

      (… this here formatting indicates that you are within a footnote raised up into the text body for reader’s convenience while presenting an appropriate comment or tangential point, simple and handy…)

      Quotations are served on separate lines offset like this:

      Last but not least, watch out for the only picture someplace in the text validating that all this is not just another screenplay for one more animation blockbuster and stuff but just as is. If this is not the most ergonomic approach, I don’t know what else can be.

      And, yes, my main concern throughout the work was providing adequate fabric to pull over so elegant framework. Stay assured, neither jerky sketches nor psycodelic splotches, nope! I/we/us were/are/and will be pulling for simple machines and leverage lucidity. I mean you don’t have to sharpen your comprehension’s edge by use of this or that dope for following twirly quirks, and fancy whimsicalities, and cerebral-tissue-busting niceties.

      Though a first-person story, The Rascally Romance, nonetheless, is not a swaggering report on Me, Myself and The Number One. No, I’m not up for narcistic self-portraits. What? This mean and stupid rascal me? Alas, but not, ‘tis gone, ‘tis gone! So, pray, desist! It’s sooner, a cross-section of the whole generation. The unvarnished Night Watch of the period, if you like, from the most breathtaking, unequaled, and fascinating era since the Creation.

      Now, full of bitter comprehension, I witness the glorious period packed, cinched, and sealed, tight and proper, 2 labels, crisscross—«stagnation»><«restructuring»—all ready get dumped into the bottomless bin of Past. Yet, neither smart labeling nor shifty package tricks would ever obscure the fact that the entire history of mankind owns no period to match the one when so naively young we were.