conversations.from: human
conversations.value: What could be a title for a book about Stockholm, Messiah, Lars with the genre: Literature & Fiction?
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: A title for this book could be 'The Messiah of Stockholm'
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Give me the first five paragraphs for this book.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: The Messiah of Stockholm
  The most delectable shock of the season so far. The three-o'clock gossips—it was now nearer five o'clock—turned it this way and that, testing for motives, for consequences. Who had duped whom? Mad Olof!—putting his head in the lion's mouth, but only after first waking up the lion. Yet the poor lion was hardly in a position to bite. Was it a case of rage, malice, revenge, despair? Or—"Contrariwise," said Gunnar—puckishness, camp, comedy, dada? A post-modernist plot. Sven was behind it all: it was Sven who had dug up for Olof all those Americans cleverly named Robert. Creeley and Mezey and Bly! Lowell, Penn Warren, Graves. Anders would have nothing to do with this theory of looking under beds for the culprit. A solemn accident of reformist patriotism, whatever the intent. Just what we need, showing us up for what we are, rubbing our noses in the dollhouse dust. Ultimate ironic burlesque of Swedish parochialism. Exposure, once and for all, of the littleness of the life of letters in decrepit old Stockholm.
  Thus the stewpot in the early winter dark. Cigarette smoke like torn nets hanging. All over the world the great ladle was stirring, stirring. The poets, dreamers, thinkers, hacks. The ambitious and the meditative. The opportunists and the provocateurs. The cabalists and the seducers. This stewpot—these hot tides—Lars under his quilt a short walk away had shut out, week after week: for the sake of catching sight of his father's eye. His father too had shunned the stewpot. Drohobycz instead of Warsaw, Drohobycz instead of Paris, Drohobycz instead of anywhere.
  Clatter on the steps; chatter; rumblings. "It's Lars Andemening," Sven Strömberg's lover explained to the landing below. "I think he's announcing the Second Coming."
  At the bottom of the staircase Lars met Nilsson waiting for him. "The telephone girl handed me this a second before quitting time. I ran into her coming out of the ladies' room. Why don't you get yourself a phone at home, Lars? The staff here isn't your butler. I'm not your valet."
  He lived on the ground floor, just off a minuscule hallway cut from an angle of the wall. There was a diseased old leather chair out there, with a cracked leg, that a doctor had once set down in that spot, long ago, for the purpose of receiving certain large parcels. No one knew what was in them, except that it meant the doctor was rich—the house had seen better days, magical deliveries: enormous frosted cakes, ladies' hats plumed and ribboned, birds in cages. This fabled chair gave its characteristic squeal, and from around the corner, out of the little hallway came a woman wearing a white beret.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Give me four more paragraphs.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: Drohobycz was now wholly peopled (but this word was unsuitable) by idols. Some were plump Buddhas in lotus position unable to walk or move. They were carried on litters by miniature Egyptian figurines, several dozen for each litter. Others were mammoth Easter Island heads. Another was the monolatrous Ikhnaton, with his disease-deformed face and limbs, himself elevated to an idol. A great many were in the shape of large stone birds—falcons, eagles, vultures, hawks, oversized crows hewn out of black marble. Each of these idols was considered to be a great and powerful god or goddess, able to control the present and future of Drohobycz, and especially the past. There was one rather modest idol—it had the form of the owner of a dry-goods shop—who could alter the last hundred years of the history of Drohobycz simply by the manipulation of a certain series of trouser buttons cleverly sewn into the flap of its caftan.
  No human beings remained in Drohobycz; only hundreds and hundreds of idols. A few were contemptibly crude and ill-constructed, but most represented the inspired toil of armies of ingenious artisans, and there was actually a handful of masterworks. The streets and shops were packed and milling with all these remarkable totems of wood, stone, pottery, silver and gold. Since there were no human beings to worship them, there was some confusion about their purpose. The more diffident among them, accordingly, undertook to adore the more aggressive; but at first this was not very typical. Each was accustomed to being regarded as sublime, each was expecting at any moment to discover a woman on her knees, a child bringing a basket of offerings, men in sacerdotal garments burning incense, or sacrificing a ram or even another human being; but there were no longer any human beings anywhere in Drohobycz. All the former shopkeepers, for instance, were visiting their shopkeeper-cousins in Warsaw and Budapest. The high school teachers were touring the museums of Paris. Several would-be fiancées were languishing in London. The rest of the population was variously scattered, and could be rounded up, if need be, in Prague or Stockholm or Moscow or even as far away as New York, Montreal, and Tel Aviv.
  The idols of Drohobycz were relatively passive and had no idea of how to go about rounding up their worshippers. It never occurred to any of them to do more than wander in and out of the town park, shuffle through the empty shops, and wait. It was as if every former inhabitant of Drohobycz had converted to atheism and fled. Religion had dried up in the churches as well as in the post office and the schools and the public library. And this was a pity, because the idols had never before been more beautifully polished, painted, and decorated than they were during their sojourn in Drohobycz. They were, to tell the truth, almost too enchanting, too seductive—which is probably why they started to bow to one another, and at length even to sacrifice to one another.
  More and more frequently there were sacrificial bonfires all over Drohobycz. The taller and stronger idols began seizing the smaller and lesser idols and casting them into the flames. Bright-torsoed gods, and in particular the little Near Eastern goddesses with their fragile budding breasts and their necklaces fitted out with bits of mirror-burnished copper strung together on serpent-skin thongs, and occasionally even an exquisite miniature Venus-copy no bigger than a finger, were being chopped up or melted down to gratify the iron maw of some huge lazy Moloch. Day and night honeyed swirls of hot incense and the acrid smoky smell of roasting metal circled over Drohobycz.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Add another sentence about fatiguing.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: Drohobycz was now wholly peopled (but this word was unsuitable) by idols. Some were plump Buddhas in lotus position unable to walk or move. They were carried on litters by miniature Egyptian figurines, several dozen for each litter. Others were mammoth Easter Island heads. Another was the monolatrous Ikhnaton, with his disease-deformed face and limbs, himself elevated to an idol. A great many were in the shape of large stone birds—falcons, eagles, vultures, hawks, oversized crows hewn out of black marble. Each of these idols was considered to be a great and powerful god or goddess, able to control the present and future of Drohobycz, and especially the past. There was one rather modest idol—it had the form of the owner of a dry-goods shop—who could alter the last hundred years of the history of Drohobycz simply by the manipulation of a certain series of trouser buttons cleverly sewn into the flap of its caftan. 
  No human beings remained in Drohobycz; only hundreds and hundreds of idols. A few were contemptibly crude and ill-constructed, but most represented the inspired toil of armies of ingenious artisans, and there was actually a handful of masterworks. The streets and shops were packed and milling with all these remarkable totems of wood, stone, pottery, silver and gold. Since there were no human beings to worship them, there was some confusion about their purpose. The more diffident among them, accordingly, undertook to adore the more aggressive; but at first this was not very typical. Each was accustomed to being regarded as sublime, each was expecting at any moment to discover a woman on her knees, a child bringing a basket of offerings, men in sacerdotal garments burning incense, or sacrificing a ram or even another human being; but there were no longer any human beings anywhere in Drohobycz. They had all gone on long, fatiguing journeys to other cities. All the former shopkeepers, for instance, were visiting their shopkeeper-cousins in Warsaw and Budapest. The high school teachers were touring the museums of Paris. Several would-be fiancées were languishing in London. The rest of the population was variously scattered, and could be rounded up, if need be, in Prague or Stockholm or Moscow or even as far away as New York, Montreal, and Tel Aviv. 
  The idols of Drohobycz were relatively passive and had no idea of how to go about rounding up their worshippers. It never occurred to any of them to do more than wander in and out of the town park, shuffle through the empty shops, and wait. It was as if every former inhabitant of Drohobycz had converted to atheism and fled. Religion had dried up in the churches as well as in the post office and the schools and the public library. And this was a pity, because the idols had never before been more beautifully polished, painted, and decorated than they were during their sojourn in Drohobycz. They were, to tell the truth, almost too enchanting, too seductive—which is probably why they started to bow to one another, and at length even to sacrifice to one another. 
  More and more frequently there were sacrificial bonfires all over Drohobycz. The taller and stronger idols began seizing the smaller and lesser idols and casting them into the flames. Bright-torsoed gods, and in particular the little Near Eastern goddesses with their fragile budding breasts and their necklaces fitted out with bits of mirror-burnished copper strung together on serpent-skin thongs, and occasionally even an exquisite miniature Venus-copy no bigger than a finger, were being chopped up or melted down to gratify the iron maw of some huge lazy Moloch. Day and night honeyed swirls of hot incense and the acrid smoky smell of roasting metal circled over Drohobycz.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Give me the last five paragraphs.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: He ran to the top of the stairwell—he could not see the mother or the child, but from the pattering stitches he understood that already they were close to the lowest landing.
  What went on troubling him was the smell—that smell of something roasting—all through Stockholm. It was a plague in every corner of the city, no matter how cleanly the bright wind came. Sometimes it seemed to lift from the baffled waters of the locks; sometimes it steamed out of the tips of steeples. It always found him out, wherever he was, whatever the season. It was as if Stockholm, burning, was slowly turning into Africa: the smell, winter or summer, of baking zebra.
  He knew this was a hallucination—it was a sort of hallucination—Heidi would have insisted it was a hallucination—it was a fancy. By the end of the year he had nearly stopped thinking about the smell, except when he awoke in the morning; it was always in his clothes in the morning.
  The stewpot, for its part, had gone back to not taking much notice of Lars Andemening; though his mail was gratifyingly plentiful and Nilsson had added (despite the envious pallor of Gunnar Hemlig and Anders Fiskyngel) a Sunday plum to his Monday and his Tuesday.
  When, less and less often, the smell flushed up out of the morning's crevices, Lars inside the narrow hallway of his skull caught sight of the man in the long black coat, hurrying with a metal garter box squeezed under his arm, hurrying and hurrying toward the chimneys. And then, in the blue light of Stockholm, among zebra fumes, he grieved.