Maneg Ikor

Maneg Ikor used the same notebook for everything he wrote. His novel, obviously, was hand-scrawled in the stiff-bound books, along with his poetry. He also used them as a diary, wrote his shopping lists and to keep basic accounts. He also used his notebooks for writing exercises, he would set himself tasks like 20 different ways to describe a heron or write a 140 word paragraph about mud. He also wrote a series of one-page confessions voiced by an array of characters never appearing before or after in any of his books.

Or did he?

Many have argued that these asides are simply part of the novel itself. For the novel was written in the first person and the narrator, also named Maneg, was an aspiring writer who kept a diary and set himself regular writing exercises.

Take the following passage from notebook 3,184, page 37-8: "Key, pills (red and blue), money, water, notebook, pen, picture of pigs."  

Maneg the author is known to have been losing his faculties as he grew older, this simple list of things to take with him when he left the house seems confirmation of that. However, Maneg the narrator was given the same impairments as he too aged. The picture of the pigs is thought to refer to the name of the house where Maneg (author) lived, or possibly where Maneg (narrator) lived, in one case the Old Piggery, in the other simply The Piggery. 

Famously, the 'novel' contained numerous incomplete short stories. It is assumed that either Maneg the author or his creation ran out of ideas. But this is disputed, some claim that the stories are completed, just later in the canon (in total Maneg's work spanned 4,017 notebooks). It is claimed, for example, that the story 'Maneg Ikor', which ends abruptly on page 33 of notebook 972, is in fact completed by the story segment 'Shit, I forgot to add this bit', on pay 63 of notebook 1927.

Such is the complexity of Maneg's work, we can never say for sure. All we know for certain is that the initial story ends suddenly and randomly, with the word 'plinth'.