The Remembered Part

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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 and 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.

“I've read few novels this exciting in recent years. Mantra is the novel I've laughed with the most, the one that has seemed the most virtuosic and at the same time the most disruptive.” Roberto Bolaño

“Rodrigo Fresán is a marvelous writer, a direct descendant of Adolfo Bioy Casares and Jorge Luis Borges, but with his own voice and of his own time, with a fertile imagination, daring and gifted with a vision as entertaining as it is profound.” John Banville

“A splendid though demanding entertainment, playful and pensive at once and beautifully written throughout.” Kirkus (Starred Review)

“Fresán's paragraphs can be mere single lines, his lines phrasal, his phrases elliptical, his ellipses infuriating and provocative, but in the end his prose bristles with energy.” Joey Rubin, Los Angeles Review of Books

Rodrigo Fresán is the author of eleven works of fiction, including Kensington Gardens, Mantra, The Invented Part, winner of the 2018 Best Translated Book Award, and, most recently, Melvill. A self-professed "referential maniac," his works incorporate many elements from science fiction (Philip K. Dick in particular) alongside pop culture and literary references. According to Jonathan Lethem, "he's a kaleidoscopic, open-hearted, shamelessly polymathic storyteller, the kind who brings a blast of oxygen into the room." In 2017, he received the Prix Roger Caillois awarded by PEN Club France every year to both a French and a Latin American writer.

Will Vanderhyden received an MA in Literary Translation Studies from the University of Rochester. He has translated fiction by Carlos Labbé, Edgardo Cozarinsky, Alfredo Bryce Echenique, Juan Marsé, Rafael Sánchez Ferlosio, Rodrigo Fresán, and Elvio Gandolfo. He received NEA and Lannan fellowships to translate another of Fresán's novels, The Invented Part.

All of my books — all three Parts among them — are filled with music. But in The Remembered Part, the songs and melodies go one step beyond and become, more than ever, a decisive factor in the story. Here are some (a very few) of those songs. The rest of the playlist waits for you in the novel...

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