(Aristides was an Athenian statesman. Subicz was the name of an ancient ruling house of Dalmatia, which spanned present-day Croatia and Bosnia.)

Of course, the more the writer Subicz explains to the agent Brodny why “his”—Subicz’s—life can’t be condensed for film, the more he ends up recounting that life itself: He narrates his birth in 1919 in Bessarabia, just after it had become annexed to Romania; his Austro-Dalmatian mother, who drags him around the Côte d’Azur as she flits between lovers, whom he calls “uncles” (“Bolivian tin-mine owners, Argentine cattle breeders, Irish beer kings, Dutch petroleum magnates,” and a Romanian nobleman with Ottoman roots—Uncle Ferdinand—who might, but might not, be the boy’s father); his mother’s suicide and his subsequent adoption by his mother’s estranged family in squalid, disembourgeoised interwar Vienna; his schooldays rivalry with chronic masturbator-cum-convinced Nazi Cousin Wolfgang; his affair with a Jewish woman named Stella and his friendship with her husband, John, a British diplomat and spy, who introduces him to haute society just as it’s collapsing.

The anecdotes don’t stop, not even for the Anschluss: Subicz keeps stuffing them in wherever he can—in body text, in dialogue, in parentheses—like he once had Aunt Selma stuff a cluster of oak leaves into the muzzle of Cousin Wolfgang’s gun:

1939: I was already in Romania to be a soldier myself, thus could not say good-bye to [Cousin Wolfgang] when he was loaded onto a train to storm into the land of the Poles. . . . But I had asked Aunt Selma to put a cluster of oak leaves in his rifle barrel (as is customary in Germany in historic hours), and, touched by my tenderness, she had obediently done so. Cousin Wolfgang took the train straight into his baptism of fire. He had no time or chance to pull the oak leaves out of the rifle barrel. He probably didn’t even recall they were there. All he knew was that the train stopped, out in the open somewhere, and he was surrounded by splintering and crashing. He thus realized he was being shot at and that it was his duty to shoot back at whatever he could see with his purblind eyes. So he shot back. And since my oak-leaf cluster was stopping up his rifle, the bullet flew back out and tore the bolt off the chamber and the thumb off his right hand. . . .

Cousin Wolfgang was sent back to Vienna with a transport of wounded soldiers on the very next train. En route, he was bitten by a rat, which had snuck (unscheduled) into the railroad car meant to hold eight horses or forty (damaged) men. By the time he arrived in Vienna several days later, Wolfgang was dying.

Subicz deserts the Romanian army fairly immediately after conscription and attempts a crazy reunion with Stella—who’s found refuge in Switzerland—in Berlin. He waits for her, but she never comes; the SS has dragged her off to the gas and ovens.

The end of the war finds Subicz in Hamburg, a city that had just been leveled in what was then the heaviest assault in the history of aerial warfare.