Péter Nádas "A Book of Memories" with Lauren Oyler

Maybe tell us what is the story, basically.

It's difficult to

synopsize.

Is it a story? It's a formal conceit, certainly, around memory, how memory works.

But basically all the normal summaries, which function more or less accurately, is that it has three different parts or there are three different narrators involved.

The first – and they are interspersed throughout the book.

The kind of – what seems to be the frame narrative is a sort of young – I think he's 30 or 33, 33-year-old guy who's been living in East Berlin and he's reflecting on a gay love affair that he had with a German poet named Melchior.

Or Melchior, I guess we say in English.

Melchior, yeah.

And he's a writer.

And he's a writer, and he's writing a novel.

But the novel that he's writing, we also get some pieces of, and it is about a kind of dandy-ish, it's like a sort of ironic dandy-ish story.

first person narration about a German also a novelist is it he's not yeah also bisexual

also quite disturbed

disturbed yeah yeah yeah it takes place at the but at the turn of the 20th century yeah

it's a fantasy yeah

it's so yeah yeah and then um towards the end there's like It's not even really a twist.

It's like a metafictional moment where the narrator changed.

There's a third narrator.

Yeah,

and it destabilizes everything that has come before it.

Because he's someone who has been...

Who

has been featured.

Yeah.