Summary

The narrator describes himself, in the beginning of Chapter 10, in the act of driving to H. in order to track down M’s wife and daughter. While doing so, he mulls upon the absence of coincidence from literature—and, in fact, the absence of coincidence from M’s books. He chides M for this decision, indicating that it removes a sense of reality from literature even as it is intended to eliminate any unbelievable element from a narrative. The narrator goes to a café planning to get a drink and casually ask after the location of M’s home, when he sees M’s daughter and wife sitting at a table with an unoccupied seat. He marvels at the coincidence, which, he writes, “some readers” would decry if “this were a...made-up story,” but goes over and introduces himself as the “downstairs neighbor...