Abstract
tle imagination to write fiction and too bad a memory to write the truth.1 I would suggest this clever bit of claptrap represents a complete misunderstanding of the genre itself, from its earliest beginnings to its current extraordinary flowering. Did Xenophon or anyone else take down the exact wording of his speeches to his armies? Almost certainly not, and yet when his hoplites shouted, Thalassa, thalassa! we readers are more thrilled than if we were reading an adventure novel. Why? Because we know the event was both true and artfully re-created to Xenophon's satisfaction. Sei Shonagon's and Sarashina's memoirs, written over a thousand years ago, are still today among the greatest achievements of Japanese literature. In Saint-Simon's Memoires Louis XTV and his court become as real or realer to
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