3 ideas
An aging man looks after holiday cottages out of season, and as a boy he survived a wartime massacre that destroyed his family and village. When a stranger comes to buy beans, the man has him sit and shell them while he recounts his life: the massacre, his years playing saxophone in a dance band, and the village that is gone. The book presents this survival as a spoken account addressed to one listener rather than as a written record.
Memory does not come back as a sequence. It surfaces through association, so an honest telling has to digress, circle back, contradict itself and leave gaps. Every attempt to narrate a life rebuilds it in the act of telling. The teller's doubts about whether things happened as he says are part of the truth, not a failure of it.
The visitor's words never reach the reader, yet his presence shapes the monologue: the narrator anticipates his reactions, appeals to him, and corrects himself in front of him. The novel leaves open who the stranger might be and hints that he may be tied to the narrator's own past, so the listener also serves as a way for the narrator to question his own memory.