An idiotic story

To read: F.S. Adam Z. Levy on Dezső Kosztolányi*, in the Los Angeles Review of Books. The novel sounds promising:

The story begins when Esti and an unnamed narrator — a fictionalized version of Kosztolányi himself — meet up on a “mad, excited day” in spring after ten years of silence to revive their former friendship and co-write, not surprisingly, the book in your hands.

“But our styles are poles apart,” Esti says to the narrator:

You’ve recently been favoring calm, simplicity, classical images. Not much decoration, not many words. My style, on the other hand, is still restless, untidy, congested, ornate, racy. I’m an incurable romantic. Lots of epithets, lots of images. I won’t let you cut that out.

And so they settle on the terms: half Estian exuberance, half the narrator’s control. “But one thing I insist on,” says Esti. “Don’t glue it all together with an idiotic story.”

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*How do you pronounce this?