Nelio Biedermann: the youngest writer with the oldest story to tell
What began as a teenager’s attempt to write about his family became Lázár: a century-spanning novel of castles, war, desire, instability and disappearing worlds. An interview with Nelio Biedermann
Lázár: why a twenty-three-year-old writer became obsessed with the twentieth century
Talk to Nelio Biedermann for more than five minutes and you start wanting to ban a single number from the conversation. Twenty-three. It’s the number every headline reaches for. The number that turns Lázár—an aristocratic Hungarian family, three generations, the slow death of the Austro-Hungarian world, two wars, communism, Stalin—into a kind of stunt in the retelling.
Then you read the novel, out now in Italy for Guanda, and the number stops mattering. Mr. Biedermann isn’t drawn to the twentieth century out of some youthful contrarian streak. He’s drawn to it because it hasn’t finished producing consequences yet.
Five drafts, one family and the decision to turn memory into fiction
The earliest of the five attempts that would become Lázár dates back to when Mr. Biedermann was sixteen, while still at school in Thalwil, on the shores of Lake Zurich where he grew up. «It was a difficult process, because I had no idea how to do it. So there were five attempts. And the fifth attempt worked out, and after I had figured out how I had to do it, it wasn’t that hard anymore. The hardest part was to figure out how to write about the family and about these topics. I think that was the most important thing: to just put the text aside and just practise and write short stories and shorter texts and different things. And then, over the years, I returned to the text again and again, and it was a good thing that I put it aside and returned and then put it aside again».
Lajos—the boy born nearly transparent at the edge of a dark forest, around whom the whole Lázár family assembles—arrived somewhere inside those five attempts.
The novel follows him and his descendants in the third person; Mr. Biedermann, despite drawing on his own family’s history, never appears in it as a character or a narrating voice.
What he refused was memoir. Mr. Biedermann described sending the manuscript to his family from Mexico, where he was living at the time, and being too far away to hear back. His father’s first reaction, once he’d read it, was to call and accuse him of lying: it was only a novel, not their family’s real history. Days later, a second call retracted the first: rereading it, his father had recognized details he hadn’t realized he’d handed down. For Mr. Biedermann, that reversal is close to the whole point of writing it as fiction rather than as a family record.
When a first novel goes global: Lázár finds its readers
The book’s reach has, since publication, widened beyond Mr. Biedermann’s own predictions. It’s been picked up for translation in something close to two dozen countries and profiled at length by the New York Times and the New Yorker. Patti Smith has called it proof that «a gifted young writer walks among us». Mr. Biedermann himself once paused a conversation about craft to report that Dua Lipa had posted the book to her Instagram Stories.
Against autofiction: writing other lives, other times, other selves
Mr. Biedermann’s generation is, broadly, the autofiction generation: first person, subtle irony, the self as primary material. He went the opposite way.
«It’s strange, because I have almost never read any historical novels, and I did read a lot of autofictional novels… It’s not that I think… I mean, speaking about it more generally, I think it is important, in literature in general, not only to write about your own experience. I think it is very important that we keep on imagining other lives and trying to be empathetic».
He tried, at first, to write himself into the material more directly, showing his research, his own reflections on the family. It didn’t work.
«It seemed more powerful to me to stick to the characters and to show their life, without me, as Nelio Biedermann, being part of the novel».
The book’s fairy-tale, almost magical-realist texture came out of a similar instinct: that fragmenting reality—the modernist move—wasn’t the only route to something true.
«There are these different movements in art and literature… every attempt to reflect reality in a novel is going to fail… for me, in this book, it seemed more true—I tried to get closer to some truth or reality by going the other direction and implementing these magical elements».
Finding the right register for a century-old story, narrated with hindsight its characters don’t have, took him longer than expected.
«I did try to write about this past from my modern perspective and with the knowledge that I have. So the characters don’t know where all of this is leading, but I, as the narrator, the author, I know what is going to happen and what will follow».
He considered aging the prose decade by decade before abandoning the idea as unworkable.
«In the end I tried to create a style in which this past and the modern tone can blend together».
Kafka, war and everyday life: how Lázár makes history personal
There’s a line from Kafka’s diaries that hangs over the whole novel without ever being quoted in it: the day Germany declared war, he went swimming. Mr. Biedermann, when the comparison was raised, recognized it as what he’d been trying to do.
«That was what I tried to capture in the novel as well: that Kafka went swimming and Germany declared war, and for him, in his personal life, at the beginning, it didn’t change much. The characters in my novel are more interested in their affairs or in some minor personal things than in the greater historical developments… I thought that everything would stop during the war, but nothing stops. People try to continue leading their daily life».
Sex, suicide and family instability: the rough themes running through Lázár
Two threads run under the whole novel: eroticism and a strain of instability that seems to follow the men in particular.
«My great-uncle has this archive, this family archive. And it’s also included in a book in some form, and there were, in this family biography, a lot of suicides. When you live in these circumstances that the characters in the novel live in, these things become a large part of your life, because they are suffering under these tight structures… They don’t know how to talk to each other, so it seemed natural to write about these things».
For him, sex in the novel is never separable from mortality or from the household’s undercurrent of instability.
«It’s all a mix of life and death and the joy and sadness and madness. It’s the perfect mix of all this».
The castle and the forest: how Nelio Biedermann recreated his family’s gothic and lost world
The manor at the center of the book, he’s explained, isn’t any single real place.
«My family did have several castles, and the main castle in the novel is a collage from these different castles. I used to visit these castles as a kid, and then also when I was older… I knew them from the stories that my grandmother, for example, told us, and then when I saw them in real life, they were different, because they were run down and disrupted and not in a good state anymore».
That gap between the myth and the ruin, he says, is where his interest in the whole story started.
«That made me interested in the story behind it, and I wanted to know how it came to be that way, what had to happen that this castle full of life now looked like this. To my ancestors it was something natural to live there, but to me, who grew up in different circumstances, imagining this felt strange… it had this strangeness to it and this isolation».
Even the forest—practical, working land to the family that owned it—reached him as something closer to gothic. «The forest, to them, was their property and something they made their living off, but to me, visiting these castles, the forest was also something almost scary. I tried to blend these different things together».
Nelio Biedermann on success, writing and the meaning of time
For a book assembled out of five aborted drafts and years of solitary return, the noise that followed publication could have felt like whiplash.
«It’s strange that after working on a book for so long, and in silence and solitude, you do all of these things that are, probably for most authors, strange: to be on a stage and talk to people and give interviews. But I’ve also come to enjoy it a lot. At the beginning you don’t know how to do it and you’re nervous, and now all of these things have disappeared. And now I do enjoy it a lot, and, I mean, it’s also great to see how the book really develops a life of its own, in a way. You discover the meaning of your writing only after publishing it and hearing what other people think about it and speaking about it in public».
«On the one hand I realized that it’s about the writing, and that I’m doing all of this because I like the process of writing and working on the book. Although everything else is very nice and I enjoy it a lot, it’s not about that. It’s not about the success, which is easy to say if the book is working well. Even in these turbulent times, I try to write every day and work as a writer and not just as a promoter of the book that I’ve written. Only after publishing I realized how importanttime and the passing of time was in the book, and in my writing in general. I’m interested in that, and I was aware of it to some extent, but not fully».
Time is what I Lázár is built from: not the forward march of a history textbook, but the private, uneven time of a family that keeps mistaking its own permanence for something structural. The castle falls into ruin so slowly that no one inside it notices until it’s already gone.
