Diego has six minutes to review 240 pages

From: Diego Torras, human proofreader To: Marina Sender, senior editor Subject: RE: Larson — final pass Time: 17:58

Marina,

It's five fifty-eight. I've looked at the biography of Kjetil Larson, the Norwegian jazzman from Bergen, in the six minutes you gave me, not in an afternoon: 240 pages translated and laid out by the machine, no typos, no obvious errors, not a single trace of the man. Not a page of it is bad; not a page of it is his.

You pay me by word corrected: I change three, I bill twelve cents, and if I touch four Rodrigo in accounts loses his temper. Today's three are these.

Page 41. Where it reads «Larson collected records», put «Larson owned 4,200 records and shelved them by label, not by year». The machine ate the number; it was in the manuscript, I've cross-checked.

Page 118. Where it reads «his mother died young», put «his mother, Ingrid, died at forty-one». Adding a name costs nothing and the book stops sounding like a template.

Page 210. Where it reads «Larson lived alone», put «Larson lived in apartment 6-B with a dog called Sonja». He said so himself in the last interview.

Twelve cents, three changes, a book that breathes. Sign the order and it goes to press tomorrow.

Diego