The protagonist-narrator of
The Invented Part
and
The Dreamed Part
returns to find an answer the question: how does a writer remember? In particular, how does a he—a writer who no longer writes but can’t stop reading and rereading himself—remember.
The Writer takes us hurtling through the refracted funhouse of his recursive and referential-maniac mind with a host of debut performances and redux appearances: the howling ghost of electricity and the defective Mr. Trip; the wuthering and heightened Penelope and her lost son;
2001: A Space Odyssey
Blade Runner
; the absent Pertusato, Nicolasito and the omnipresent IKEA; the dead Colma, the deceased ZZYZX, the departed Nothing, and the immortal Sad Songs; the irrealist Vladimir Nabokov and the surrealist Karmas;
Wish You Were Here
playing on (im)mobil(izing) phones and Dracula being invited in; the disturbed Uncle Hey Walrus and parents who are models but not at all model parents; The Beatles and
The Beatles
; a nonexistent country of origin and a city in flames; an unforgettable night that wants nothing more than to be rewritten; and so many more accelerated particles and freewheeling fragments and interlinked cells searching for a storyline to give them some structure, some meaning.
With mordant wit, capacious intelligence, and vertiginous prose,
The Remembered Part
closes Rodrigo Fresán’s sprawling tryptic novel. A novel that has at its heart the three component parts of literary creation, the engines that drive the writing of fictional lives and the narration of real works of art: invention, dream, and memory. It is a masterpiece by one of contemporary literature’s most daring and innovative writers.