The novel he lends his name to is an account of that life, taking more or less the form of a memoir set down in the years immediately after World War II by an old man mentally preparing for death, not quite at home in the twentieth century (and a little proud of it, stubbornly clinging to his eartrumpet), whose significant memories reach back to the early 1890s and beyond.

uncultivable wasteland

[…] a species of wandering trader—a pestilential fellow, snapping ivory from the natives.

to overpitch a note in music