Tragic, closely intertwined with our common destiny: The "reality" we will experience, the experiences we will gain from reading do not cease to have as their starting point the nonexistent world of the book we hold in our hands.

And our desire to delve, even for a moment, into this world does not reveal anything but our inability to oppose our very fate, our deep-seated desire for the unattainable, the deep but powerful longing to transcend the reality that limits our potential.

Examining the nonfiction novel, this study explores how real life affects fiction and vice versa; how reality sometimes conceals and at other times reveals its literary dimension, how non-literary material gains fictional substance, and ultimately how the coupling of literature with extra-literary reality is something that inevitably concerns us all.