CANR
WORK TITLE:
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CITY: Buenos Aires
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COUNTRY: Argentina
NATIONALITY: Argentine
LAST VOLUME: CANR 316
http://articles.latimes.com/2013/nov/22/entertainment/la-ca-jc-cesar-aira-20131124 http://www.themillions.com/2013/11/things-just-happen-dont-ask-why-cesar-airas-the-hare-and-shantytown.html
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Born February 23, 1949, in Coronel Pringles, Argentina.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Writer and translator. Has lectured at the University of Buenos Aires and the University of Rosario.
AWARDS:PEN Translates Award, 2020, for The Divorce.
WRITINGS
Also author of Biografía, 2014.
La prueba was adapted for film as Suddenly, 2002.
SIDELIGHTS
César Aira is one of Argentina’s most prolific authors. He has published more than sixty works, including novels, novellas, biographies, essays, screenplays, and short stories. His works have been translated into other languages and published in France, Italy, Brazil, Spain, Mexico, Venezuela, Argentina, and the United States. He also has taught courses on literature and writing at the University of Buenos Aires and the University of Rosary.
“Aira’s novels are very much like folk tales in that they rely on paradox, disjointedness, and ruptures to carry the story forward,” remarked Marcelo Ballvé in an essay on the author and his works on the Web site Quarterly Conversation. Ballvé went on to say: “His works are fashioned not from sweeping modern visions but from a civilization’s odds and ends, shreds of meaning, the clutter of a reader’s memory and imagination. And like avant-garde visual and literary artists of the early 20th-century (especially the surrealists), Aira is obsessed with procedure and process, the actions at the mysterious origins of art. Also like the avant-gardists, Aira is interested in disrupting the normal workings of the cultural market in which his products are consumed.”
Likening Aira’s work to that of artist Marcel Duchamp, Millions contributor Will Heyward said that “contradictions and incongruity are Aira’s bread and butter. He takes hold of, toys with, and throws by the side of the road any number of genres, moods, and plots, all in the space of a hundred pages. … His prose has a euphoric, blindfolded momentum; the events that take place are at once inevitable and unimaginable. Fate, that otherwise unfashionable narrative antique, has a hand in everything.”
Novellas
One of Aira’s first critically acclaimed works is the 1984 novella Canto castrato. Published in Argentina and Spain, in both French and Spanish, the book is a historical novel whose main character is Il Micchino, a noted Italian castrato from the 1730s. The storyline follows Aira’s protagonist from his vacation home in Italy to engagements in Vienna and St. Petersburg. Other characters include his Austrian impresario, a composer, a Spanish monk, a costume-designing nun, and other young castrati. Many reviewers found Canto castrato to be compelling and well written. The novel “combines impressive historical and musicological erudition with memorable description,” wrote Times Literary Supplement contributor Chris Andrews.
Aira’s groundbreaking novella, La prueba, was published in 1992. The work tells the story of two lesbian punks, Mao and Lenin, who kidnap a young lingerie store clerk named Marcia. In turn, Marcia ends up falling in love with Mao. The three women band together to take hostage a grocery store and its shoppers.
Aira’s first book produced by an American publisher, Argentina: The Great Estancias, appeared in 1995. The book features twenty-two Argentine cattle ranches, shown through photographs of each ranch’s buildings, gardens, and pastures. To accompany the photography of Tomas de Elia and Cristina Cassinelli de Corral, Aira writes about each place’s history, as well as the overall history of Argentina’s cattle ranches and their influence on the nation’s economy.
The narrator of Aira’s novella Conversations spends his days chatting at a café with a close friend. Later each evening, the narrator revisits these conversations and muses on their meandering forms, noting how conversations borrow from memory and, in turn, shape new memories. This stream of consciousness, according to Booklist reviewer Vanessa Bush, “erases the boundaries” between the narrator’s own thoughts and those of others, and creates a “kind of echoing of talk and thoughts” that demonstrates the fluidity of individual awareness and the unreliability of memory.
The book begins with the narrator’s recollection of that day’s conversation, about a film that both friends had watched. The film contains an incongruous detail: an actor portraying a poor goatherd is wearing a gold Rolex watch. In the narrator’s view, the watch was an oversight. But his friend suggests otherwise, arguing that the watch was included intentionally in service of the film’s real subject, the making of a film. From there, the friends go on to discuss such vexed subjects as the nature of fiction and its relationship with reality, Kant’s philosophy, and Eastern European politics.
In Publishers Weekly, a reviewer admired the “logic-defying brilliance” of Conversations. For Matt Pincus, writing in Bookslut, the novel’s exploration of memory, consciousness, and the creation of stories calls to mind Faulkner’s masterful development of these themes in Absalom, Absalom! and Light in August. The conversation at the center of Aira’s book, said Pincus, “acts as a decoy to explore creativity, or how each individual human explores their subjective experience, and reacts to … as Faulkner once said, ‘conflicts of the human heart.’”
In Dinner, a lonely middle-aged bachelor and his mother have dinner at the house of a friend, who regales them with bizarre anecdotes and shows off his huge collection of antique wind-up toys. Later that night, the bachelor is watching TV at his mother’s house when a live broadcast announces the beginning of the zombie apocalypse. Across town, the city’s dead are rising from their graves and running amok in search of their necessary food: the brains of living human beings. Just as total apocalypse seems imminent, however, an elderly woman recognizes one of the undead. When she calls out his name, the zombie halts. He eventually returns to his grave and the town is saved.
“Dinner is an unusual construct,” wrote Felix Haas in Bookslut. “It is funny and entertaining, as much as it is bizarre and fragmented. The two stories that live in this novella never become one.” Haas also noted the book’s comedic appeal, observing that “what sounds gruesome never fails to carry quite a bit of humour and irony.” Writing in Quarterly Conversation, Jeff Bursey pointed out that Dinner draws fascinating parallels between the narrator, whose isolation mimics death, and the lifeless but animated figures (both the zombies and the host’s wind-up toys) that threaten him. A Kirkus Reviews contributor deemed Dinner “an outlandish but absorbing meditation on being alive among the dead.”
Novels
In 1998, the British publisher Serpent’s Tail released The Hare, an English translation of Aira’s 1991 novel La liebre. In this work, Aira tells the story of an English naturalist searching for the rare Legibrian Hare in Argentina. The translation was made by travel author Nick Caistor.
In 2002, Aira published another critically acclaimed novel, Varamo. The main character, Varamo, a middle-aged office clerk, is paid to write a poem, even though poetry and literature are subjects he knows little about. His efforts result in a work that is both innovative and avant-garde. The narrator in the story brings up overlying questions about the status of fiction, narrative voice, intentionality, literary criticism, and the relation between profit motives and literature. Reviewers praised Aira’s talents with the release of Varamo. In a review of the book in World Literature Today, Will H. Corral wrote: “Prolific, self-plagiarizing, humorous, and a vastly capable prose writer, Aira liberates morality and intimacy as the basic forms of freedom.”
Despite Aira’s prolific output, relatively few of his works have been translated into English. How I Became a Nun, originally released in 1993 as Como me hice monja, is his third book to be published in English; the second was An Episode in the Life of a Landscape Painter, a translation of Un episodio en la vida del Pintor Viajero. How I Became a Nun tells the story of a six-year-old girl who becomes ill after eating cyanide-tainted ice cream. The disjointed story traces the girl’s hospital stay and later her transition into first grade where she makes friends with a rich boy, Arturito. Tayt J. Harlin, in a review of the novel on the Bookslut Web site, remarked that the protagonist “wouldn’t be out of place in J.D. Salinger’s fiction, and her tendency to examine and re-examine her life endlessly and witheringly recalls the protagonists in Thomas Bernhard’s work.”
Ghosts is Aira’s fourth book to be translated into English. First published in Spanish in 1990 as Los fantasmas, the story revolves around a migrant Chilean family, the Vinases, who are living temporarily at a construction site in Buenos Aires where luxury condominiums are being built. On New Year’s Eve, Raul Vinas hosts a party with his wife, Elisa, and children, including their fifteen-year-old daughter, Patri, who is a focal point of the novel. In addition, ghosts in the form of fat naked men reside at the construction site; they float around mostly unnoticed except by Elisa and Patri. “Ultimately a novel about the mechanics within families and the ways in which they create expectations for our lives, expectations which perhaps we can’t or don’t always want to meet, Ghosts is another welcome novel from César Aira, making one hopeful that more and more will be translated into English,” observed Scott Bryan Wilson in a review of the book on the Quarterly Conversation Web site. Wilson added that while the novel “lacks the documentary or autobiographical elements” of Aira’s other novels translated into English, in “its focus on the ordinary people of Argentina there’s a realism present that overcomes what might otherwise be an outright disbelief in the eponymous inhabitants of the construction site.” In the New York Times Book Review, contributor Natasha Wimmer observed: “Aira likes nothing better than to probe the obscure workings of the mind, but he also writes scenes of great prosaic beauty. The modest, lovely New Year’s Eve party on the roof, complete with firecrackers and piles of fruit … is a velvety backdrop for the novel’s shocking final act.”
Aira’s 2001 novel La villa was translated as Shantytown in 2012. Set in the slum districts of Buenos Aires, the tale follows an ensemble case of downtrodden residents and criminals, and the outsiders who encounter them. Aira portrays a middle-class boy named Maxi who prefers to hang out in the slums with the scavengers, children who collect cardboard and other useful trash for resale. The boy suffers from a form of night blindness. Maxi’s sister, Vanessa, also prefers darker haunts, and she begins a strange partnership with a corrupt police detective named Ignacio Cabezas. The man wants to use Vanessa to gather information about a local drug ring that sells a fictional hallucinogenic called proxidine. The drug can be fatal, and Ignacio is desperate to prevent further drug-related deaths. He pretends to be the father of Vanessa’s dead classmate in order to manipulate her into cooperating with him.
A Kirkus Reviews contributor called the book “a tiny slice of Buenos Aires noir” and “a very literary crime story with South American attitude that is lean, spare and resonant.” Hector Tobar, writing in the Los Angeles Times, praised Shantytown, noting that “with Aira the melodrama quickly falls away. There are no easy truths here, no pat judgments about good and evil. Instead, with a few final acts of narrative sleight of hand (and some odd soliloquies) the reader is left at once dazzled and unsettled.” Yet, according to Three Percent Web site reviewer Owen Rowe, “Aira’s worlds always have something of the noir to them. We’re always trying to decipher the structures, get things down in black and white; we’re often frustrated, yet still compelled to follow the thinnest, most unpromising narrative thread towards a distant possible exit. At least there aren’t always bodies piling up.” Countering this opinion on the Tottenville Review Web site, Pat Finn advised: “For the patient reader willing to indulge a messy, improvisational writer of staggering imaginative energy, Aira should not be missed. … the way Shantytown pushes forth, dubiously forward, without stopping to forge meaningful links between its different sections might place it among his most characteristic works to date. Though it can make for frustrating reading, Aira’s commitment to a vision of writing that is tolerant and comprehensive, embracing of flaws and narrative disjunctures, is very moving, at least to me. After all, there is something rather stodgy and dead-seeming about flawless, authoritative ‘great works’. In contrast, Aira’s is a life-affirming artistic praxis.”
(open new) Aira’s first novel, Ema, la cautiva, published in 1981, finally saw an English translation in 2016 as Ema, the Captive. Set in nineteenth-century Argentina, the novel features the eponymous protagonist who is taken prisoner by soldiers along with her baby and led to a primitive fort. There she becomes the concubine of a succession of soldiers and natives, becomes wife and mother and throughout retains her own mysterious and unbroken spirit. “Ema has a fierceness that makes her compelling,” commented a Kirkus Reviews critic, who further called this a “poetic, languorous tale.” The critic concluded: “An elegant, almost ethereal story of one woman’s survival.” A Publishers Weekly reviewer was also impressed, commenting: “Never tedious, always thoughtful, Aira’s prose moves with great agility and effortless depth.”
Aira collects two of his short novels in The Little Buddhist Monk & The Proof from 2017. The monk of the title wants to depart his native Korea for the West, but his dreams are thwarted when a French photographer and his wife hire him to be their tour guide to Korean temples. The monk has high hopes that these two will take him with them back to France, but they ultimately abandon him. In The Proof, a pair of punk lesbians want to seduce an adolescent. In order to prove their love for her, they commit a homicide. Writing in Library Journal, Lawrence Olszewski felt that “[r]eaders of magic realism will appreciate Aira’s reliance on inventive absurdities and his theme of the quest for identity.” Similarly, a Kirkus Reviews contributor commented: “Two unnerving, challenging stories about identity sparked by subtle delights and surprising ends.” Prairie Schooner reviewer Bradley Babendir also had praise for this pair of shot novels, concluding: “Aira fuses the magical realist elements with an early-era George Saundersian postmodern credulity, and the package is impossible to resist. His aptitude for wild plots, stuffed with thoughtful, odd characters only makes this attraction greater. … Aira remains one of the most unique and enchanting writers alive.”
In Prins, from 2019, Aria tells of an author who writes Gothic novels. So successful is the narrator that he can hire a team of ghostwriters to churn on his tales, as he hates what he is doing. Instead, he turns to opium, and en route to buy the drug, associates with Alicia, a woman he meets on the bus, and Ujier, the dealer. Together, these three repair to an old mansion where the opium turns their lives into one of the narrator’s Gothic novels. Reviewing the novel in World Literature Today, Will H. Corral called Prins a “search for authentic thrills,” as well as a “magnificent reappraisal of what [Aria] is up to now aesthetically.”
Aria portrays his own obsession with Artforum magazine in his 2020 book of interconnected tales, Artforum. At the center of work is a collector bedeviled by his search for copies of the magazine. Told by a friend that a certain shop has copies, he obsesses about the purchase, worrying if the shop will be open. He takes a subscription, but the magazine never arrives. His collection is rained on at one point, though only one copy is ruined. “As Aira illuminates the dead ends in his drive to collect the magazine, he offers rich insight into the appreciation of art and the desire to possess,” noted a Publishers Weekly reviewer. “This entertaining jaunt through the writer’s creative development satisfies with its brevity and grace.” Similarly, a Kirkus Reviews critic concluded: “A marvelous little collection about compulsion, obsession, and the extraordinary joy that a simple pleasure can bring.” (close new)
Short Stories
The Musical Brain: And Other Stories contains twenty tales that, as a writer in Kirkus Reviews observed, “begin in the middle, spin on a dime and are often as warped as a Salvador Dali landscape.” Among these is “In the Café,” in which a writer puts his thoughts to paper in a café and then throws them away. A little girl happily clutches at these discarded pieces of paper, but the shapes are so fragile that they disintegrate as soon as she touches them. In “A Thousand Drops,” the droplets of oil that comprise the Mona Lisa decide to leave their canvas for a new life elsewhere; “Acts of Charity” focuses on a priest who collects alms for the poor but, instead of helping the destitute, uses the money instead to build a shrine to the concept of charity. The jazz pianist Cecil Taylor is the eponymous protagonist of a story that explores the unruliness of the creative process.
Reviewing the collection in the New York Times Book Review, Patti Smith said that “Aira’s cubist eye sees from every angle. … His characters—whether comic-strip ruffians, apes, subatomic particles or a version of his boyhood self—enter a shifting and tilting landscape of events that unhinge our temporal existence and render it phantasmagorical yet seemingly everyday in the unfolding. His matter-of-fact approach, accepting even the most outlandish episodes, suspends disbelief and encourages one’s own sense of displacement, of being released from the commonplace.” A writer in Publishers Weekly expressed similar enthusiasm, concluding that The Musical Brain “might be [Aira’s] masterpiece.”
Memoir
Turning to memoir, Aira published El tilo in 2003. The book begins with a description of the enormous lime tree (“el tilo”) that stands in the town square of Coronel Pringles, Argentina, where Aira grew up. Aira’s father used to collect the lime tree’s blossoms to make a sedative tea. The author uses this image from his past to transition into memories of a childhood marked by the 1955 Revolución Libertadora that ousted Eva Perón. His father, a devoted Perónísta, was devastated by the revolution.
Many reviewers praised El tilo. Some found Aira’s ability to channel his childhood thoughts so effectively to be a compelling part of the book. “ El tilo is both a portrait of the artist as a child and a lucid analysis of a family’s social trajectory,” commented Chris Andrews in the Times Literary Supplement, adding that Aira “brilliantly re-creates the mental mechanisms deployed in child’s play.”
(open new) Aira again turns to memoir in The Linden Tree, describing growing up in Argentina with parents battling over divergent political views. His father was a staunch believer in President Juan Peron, but his mother was an anti-Peronist. “Fans of Aira may gain occasional insight into his writerly preoccupations,” noted a Publishers Weekly reviewer, “but the seemingly random jumps between recollections prevent an edifying portrait of the novelist as a young man from emerging.” A higher assessment was offered by a Kirkus Reviews critic who concluded: “A funny, sardonic, and richly emotional journey through one man’s interior experience.”
In Birthday, Aria offers a meditation on his fiftieth birthday. The author again blends quiet musings on his life with discussions of how his writing style has changed over time. Writing in the online Open Letters Review, Bailey Trela was not impressed with this work, finding “something dry, almost aseptic” about it. Others had a higher assessment. A Kirkus Reviews contributor termed the writing “whimsical, humorous, and poignant by turns.” The contributor concluded: “A fanciful contemplation of the writer’s life that is not quite a novel or a memoir but a whimsical combination of the two.” Similarly, The Skinny website reviewer Emily Corpuz observed: “César Aira’s unconventional memoir is filled with timeless reflections on the struggle of learning to live well.” (close new).
In an interview with María Moreno that was posted on the website Bomb, Aira talked about his writing: “I’ve always thought that in order to be prolific you don’t really have to write a lot, it’s sufficient just to write well.” He continued: “Writing a lot is what a monkey does when they sit him in front of a typewriter. Physically, I could write ten pages a day, but what’s important is for them to be of some value, that somebody will be interested in reading them, and that they can be published. I’ve realized that the perfect length for what I do is one hundred pages. In my brevity there may be an element of insecurity. I wouldn’t dare give a 1,000-page novel to a reader.” The author added: “Once the Argentine novelist Rodrigo Fresán and I made the calculations, and he writes in two weeks—working on a newspaper, two magazines, and writing his own novel—what I write in a year. My novels became shorter as I became more renowned. People now allow me to do whatever I want. At any rate, publishers prefer thick books. But with books, the thicker they are, the less literature they have.”
BIOCRIT
BOOKS
Aira, César, El tilo, Beatriz Viterbo Editora (Rosario, Argentina), 2003.
PERIODICALS
Booklist, January 1, 1996, Brad Hooper, review of Argentina: The Great Estancias, p. 770; June 1, 2014, Vanessa Bush, review of Conversations, p. 31; March 1, 2015, Diego Baez, review of The Musical Brain: And Other Stories, p. 20.
Harvard Review, June 1, 2008, Odile Cisneros, review of How I Became a Nun, p. 185.
Kirkus Reviews, October 15, 2013, review of Shantytown; January 1, 2015, review of The Musical Brain; August 15, 2015, review of Dinner; October 1, 2016, review of Ema the Captive; March 15, 2017, review of The Little Buddhist Monk & The Proof; February 15, 2018, review of The Linden Tree; December 15, 2018, review of Birthday; January 15, 2020, review of Artforum.
Latin American Literary Review, July-December, 1999, Patrick J. O’Connor, “César Aira’s Simple Lesbians: Passing La prueba,” p. 149.
Library Journal, March 15, 2012, Lawrence Olszewski, review of Varamo, p. 101; December 1, 2015, Jack Shreve, review of Dinner, p. 88; February 15, 2017, Lawrence Olszewski, review of The Little Buddhist Monk & The Proof, p. 85.
Los Angeles Times, March 1, 2009, Thomas McGonigle, review of Ghosts; November 22, 2013, Hector Tobar, review of Shantytown.
New Yorker, March 30, 2009, review of Ghosts, p. 71; March 12, 2012, review of Varamo, p. 75.
New York Times Book Review, March 8, 2009, Natasha Wimmer, “Specters on the Roof,” review of Ghosts, p. 19; March 10, 2015, Patti Smith, review of The Musical Brain.
Prairie Schooner, November 4, 2017, Bradley Babendir, review of The Little Buddhist Monk & The Proof, p. 190.
Pregonero, September 17, 1998, Rafael Roncal, review of Como me hice monja, p. 12.
Publishers Weekly, December 22, 2008, review of Ghosts, p. 31; May 30, 2011, review of The Seamstress and the Wind, p. 49; November 4, 2013, review of The Hare, p. 22; April 28, 2014 review of Conversations, p. 102; January 5, 2015, review of The Musical Brain, p. 49; September 12, 2016, review of Ema the Captive, p. 30; February 26, 2018, review of The Linden Tree, p. 62; December 16, 2019, review of Artforum, p. 89.
San Francisco Chronicle, March 4, 2009, Megan Doll, review of Ghosts, p. E2.
Times Literary Supplement, May 14, 2004, Chris Andrews, reviews of Canto castrato and El tilo.
World Literature Today, April-June, 2003, Will H. Corral, review of Varamo, p. 152; July, 2007, Will H. Corral, review of How I Became a Nun; November 1, 2019, Will H. Corral, review of Prins, p. 99.
ONLINE
Amazon, https://www.amazon.com/ (July 10, 2020), “César Aira.”
Bomb, http://www.bombsite.com/ (November 24, 2009), María Moreno, author interview.
Bookslut, http://www.bookslut.com/ (May 1, 2007), Tayt J. Harlin, review of How I Became a Nun; (March 1, 2009), Jesse Tangen-Mills, review of Ghosts; (July 27, 2016), Matt Pincus, review of Conversations; (July 27, 2016), Felix Haas, review of Dinner.
Cleaver, http://www.cleavermagazine.com/ (July 27, 2016), Ana Schwartz, review of Conversations.
Fantastic Fiction, https://www.fantasticfiction.com/ (July 10, 2020), “César Aira.”
Literatura Argentina Contemporanea, http://www.literatura.org/ (December 8, 2004), “César Aira.”
Los Angeles Times, https://www.latimes.com/ (April 1, 2020), Tyler Malone, “Review: César Aira, a Novelist of Obsession Worth Obsessing Over.”
Millions, http://www.themillions.com/ (July 27, 2016), Will Heyward, “Things Just Happen, Don’t Ask Why: Cé Aira’s The Hare and Shantytown.”
New Yorker, https://www.newyorker.com/ (January 27, 2017), Alena Graedon, “César Aira’s Infinite Footnote to Borges.”
NPR, https://www.npr.org/ (April 12, 2020), Kamil Ahsan, “In Cesar Aira’s Latest, ‘Artforum‘ Has a Magic Beyond the Page.”
Open Letters Review, https://openlettersreview.com/ (May 14, 2019 ), Bailey Trela, review of Birthday.
Quarterly Conversation, http://quarterlyconversation.com/ (November 24, 2009), Marcelo Ballvé, “The Literary Alchemy of César Aira,” author profile; (November 24, 2009), Scott Bryan Wilson, review of Ghosts; (July 27, 2016), Jeff Bursey, review of Dinner.
Skinny, https://www.theskinny.co.uk/ (February 28, 2019), Emily Corpuz, review of Birthday.
Three Percent, http://www.rochester.edu/College/translation/threepercent/ (March 11, 2014), Owen Rowe, review of Shantytown; (July 27, 2016), Lori Feathers, review of Dinner.
Tottenville Review, http://www.tottenvillereview.com/ (March 11, 2014), Pat Finn, review of Shantytown.*
César Aira
Argentina (b.1949)
César Aira (born on February 23, 1949 in Coronel Pringles, Buenos Aires Province) is an Argentine writer and translator, considered by many as one of the leading exponents of Argentine contemporary literature, in spite of his limited public recognition.
He has published over fifty books of stories, novels and essays. Indeed, at least since 1993 a hallmark of his work is an almost frenetic level of writing and publication -two to four novella-length books each year.
New Books
July 2021
(hardback)
The Famous Magician
Novels
The Hare (1997)
An Episode in the Life of a Landscape Painter (2006)
How I Became a Nun (2007)
Ghosts (2009)
The Seamstress and the Wind (2011)
Ema the Captive (2016)
The Little Buddhist Monk (2017)
The Proof (2017)
The Lime Tree (2017)
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Omnibus
Three Novels by Csar Aira (2013)
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Collections
The Musical Brain (2015)
Artforum (2020)
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Novellas
The Literary Conference (2010)
The Miracle Cures of Dr. Aira (2012)
Shantytown (2013)
The Conversations (2014)
Dinner (2015)
The Linden Tree (2018)
The Famous Magician (2021)
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Non fiction
Varamo (2012)
On Contemporary Art (2018)
Birthday (2019)
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César Aira was born in Coronel Pringles, Argentina in 1949, and has lived in Buenos Aires since 1967. He taught at the University of Buenos Aires (about Copi and Rimbaud) and at the University of Rosario (Constructivism and Mallarmé), and has translated and edited books from France, England, Italy, Brazil, Spain, Mexico, and Venezuela.
Perhaps one of the most prolific writers in Argentina, and certainly one of the most talked about in Latin America, Aira has published more than eighty books to date in Argentina, Mexico, Colombia, Venezuela, Chile, and Spain, which have been translated for France, Great Britain, Italy, Brazil, Portugal, Greece, Austria, Romania, Russia, and now the United States.
One novel, La prueba, has been made into a feature film, and How I Became a Nun was chosen as one of Argentina's ten best books. Besides essays and novels Aira writes regularly for the Spanish newspaper El País. In 1996 he received a Guggenheim scholarship, in 2002 he was shortlisted for the Rómulo Gallegos prize, and has been shortlisted for the Man Booker International Prize.
César Aira’s Infinite Footnote to Borges
By Alena Graedon
January 27, 2017
The Argentinian writer Csar Aira who has published more than eighty works of fiction and nonfiction.
The Argentinian writer César Aira, who has published more than eighty works of fiction and nonfiction.PHOTOGRAPH BY MATHIEU BOURGOI / WRITER PICTURES VIA AP
César Aira doesn’t like to be called “prolific.” He has, however, published more than eighty works of fiction and nonfiction. Last month, “Ema, the Captive,” which was first published in Spanish, in 1978, became the thirteenth of his novels available in English. (He’s been translated into seven other languages as well.) Aira, who was born in Argentina, in 1949, has spent most of his life in Buenos Aires. In “Ema,” which is set in the nineteenth century, soldiers take a young woman prisoner and, after a journey marked by baroque violence, bring her to “the edge of the world,” Argentina’s southern frontier. “Ema” is as inventive and aphoristic as Aira’s best works. It also includes depictions of “Indians” that can come across as exoticizing, which may have been intentional; some of Aira’s other fiction deploys the trope of Western colonizers smothering reality with prefabricated forms. In “Ema,” he mentions “Darwin’s sketches of the Indians, crude vignettes that always show them about to mount a skinny horse with a human face.”
Aira’s novels are difficult to classify—they’re by turns realist, surrealist, absurd, and philosophical. He has written about an accident that disfigured the nineteenth-century German painter Johann Moritz Rugendas (“Episode in the Life of a Landscape Painter”), a construction site haunted by naked ghosts (“Ghosts”), and a translator-cum-mad scientist who sets out to clone the Mexican writer Carlos Fuentes (“The Literary Conference”). When I asked him, a while back, about works in progress, he described two very different books: one was an “extreme roman à clef,” for which, he joked, “only one person in the world” has the key. The other he compared to an Escher drawing, a “completely irrational narrative.” His novels’ most consistent features are their brevity—they’re generally a hundred pages or less—and their method of composition, which he has called “la huída hacia adelante,” or the constant flight forward. Roughly, this means that he writes without rewriting, inventing as he goes.
When I met with Aira, a little more than a year ago, in Buenos Aires, we talked less about his writing than his habits of reading. Aira’s day is as punctuated by reading as it is by meals: periodicals in the morning, prose in the afternoon, and, in the evening, poetry. Every night at 9:30 p.m., he takes a whiskey. (After that, he said, laughing, it’s harder to follow prose.) We spoke twice, in cafés in an area of the Palermo neighborhood known as Villa Freud, for its density of psychologists. Per Argentinian custom, we were served delicate cookies with our coffees. Gracious and mannerly, Aira picked me up before our first meeting and later walked me home, stopping, at one point, to give a stranger directions. His hair is graying and he wore dark-rimmed glasses, with a light jacket for the early spring cold.
Aira laughs often and speaks deliberately, in a smoky baritone. He’s a translator, including from English; we talked in my language, rather than his. Decades ago, when translation was his livelihood, he specialized in “bad literature,” he said: it took less time to translate but paid just as well. The story of “Ema, the Captive” was modelled on the plot of one such book, he told me. He transported the narrative from Australia to Argentina, and gave Ema pheasants instead of sheep to raise. (“Sheeps are cheap,” he said.)
Aira grew up in the small agricultural town of Coronel Pringles in the south of Buenos Aires Province. (Much of “Ema” is set there.) One of his earliest memories, from when he was at most three years old, involves books. Telling me this, he provided narration as if it were happening again. “I see myself, my aunt, and my mother,” he began; they were in his grandmother’s house. His aunt had a child who was Aira’s age, his cousin Mario. “And my aunt said, ‘I had two little books for you. Libritos, for you.’ ” But she didn’t have them anymore, because Mario (“Bad boy!”) had destroyed them. Maybe, Aira said, sighing theatrically, he hadn’t even known yet what books were_.__ _Still, a desire to have them took hold then.
The Pringles library was unusually good, because a man in the town—his own father’s former primary-school teacher, Aira explained, who’d also been a diplomat in Russia—had donated his private collection. “There was everything,” Aira told me. “It was wonderful.” In the stacks, he discovered Franz Kafka, Thomas Mann, James Joyce. “I read there, for the first time, Proust, when I was fourteen—fourteen and fifteen.” He read Proust in Spanish then. But when he moved to Buenos Aires a few years later the first thing he bought at the end of school was the full set of “In Search of Lost Time” in French, which he dedicated his holiday to rereading. He has read French literature in the original ever since. “How do you read Baudelaire in translation?” he said. “Rimbaud? No.”
Growing up, Aira wasn’t alone in the Pringles library. Arturo Carrera, a boy one year older than Aira, was also there frequently. Carerra is now a renowned poet as well as Aira’s lifelong friend. They were introduced, Aira said, when he was an infant; Carrera bit his nose. Early in their teens, they realized that they both wanted to be writers. “We divided: for him, poetry; for me, prose.” Later, as students, they co-founded a literary journal, El Cielo. When Aira and I met, his daughter was pregnant with his first grandchild. “He’s going to be called Arturo,” Aira said, laughing. “I’ll have my own Arturito.”
Our second interview took place on a brisk Saturday morning at the Velvet café on Plaza Güemes, across from the Romanesque Basílica del Espiritu Santo. The café, which has big windows and high ceilings dotted with track lights, was nearly empty when we arrived, but it soon filled. It was October 17th, Loyalty Day, which commemorates the date in 1945, four years before Aira was born, when large popular demonstrations erupted to protest the imprisonment of a young Colonel Juan Perón. “And that was the beginning of the end of Argentina,” Aira said. The next year, Perón won the Presidential election, and he soon established an oppressive, isolationist regime. He was deposed in a revolutionary coup, in 1955.
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Aira remembers the revolution vividly. He was six when fighting broke out at a naval base near Bahía Blanca, roughly eighty miles from Aira’s home town. At the time, he and his family were staying at a great-aunt’s house. Then the bombing began. “It was lights, all the lights,” Aira said. “And then . . . silence.” The bombs fell not in the town proper but into the river nearby. Nonetheless, he remembers soldiers and stretchers. “And all the rest of my childhood I went with a bicycle there to see the”—and here he paused, and laughed, as he often did, even when recalling dark memories—“the corpses. Like a movie.”
Aira glanced down at the white tablecloth. When he was in his twenties, Argentina’s Dirty War began. It lasted until 1983. At least thirty thousand people, many of them students, were “disappeared.” Aira was a “young militant leftist” then, he once told an interviewer for The Nation. One day, after leaving a political assembly at the University of Buenos Aires—it was boring, he said—he was detained. He didn’t realize that students and police were clashing on campus. Cops caught up with him as he was running—probably from tear gas, though he told the Nation_ _interviewer, “Surely, I was in a rush to get home and keep reading Proust.” For his bad luck, he spent nearly three weeks in jail. “Once, I lost consciousness,” he told me. But he found a way to pass the time. “My sister brought me the Virgilio. Virgil . . . in Latin.”
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The one writer Aira kept returning to as we talked was Jorge Luis Borges. It would have been hard not to mention his name—Jorge Luis Borges Street was just a few blocks from where we sat sipping coffees that had by then turned cold. When we discussed the Pope, Aira noted, “You know, Borges said once that there is no idea so absurd that a philosopher has not thought it.” Smiling wryly, he added that if there was an idea so absurd that even a philosopher hadn’t thought it, a theologian had. At one point, Aira told me, “We are always_ _talking about Borges.”
Aira first saw the name when he was twelve or thirteen. It kept showing up in the paper—“Borges, Borges, Borges,” he recalled—and he became curious. He located Borges’s publisher and wrote the firm a letter, asking if he could buy Borges’s books. Just send a check, the publisher replied. Aira’s father did so, and books by Borges soon arrived in the mail. “That changed my life,” Aira said.
He was prepared for Borges’s work by Superman comics, he explained. “Superman was an intellectual exercise. Because Superman had all the powers. But he had to have a Lex Luthor.” And, Aira continued, if Superman has “_all _the powers,” then Lex Luthor must have “something more.” I thought of one of Aira’s short stories: “The Infinite,” from his story collection “The Musical Brain.” In it, two boys devise a game that consists of trying to one-up the other by listing larger and larger numbers. Inevitably, they end up repeating “infinity,” “infinity infinities,” “infinity infinity infinities,” and so on, back and forth. They each have to add something more.
Aira saw Borges many times, at the old National Library, which Borges then directed; at the University of Buenos Aires, where he taught literature; and at conferences. “But I never talked with him,” Aira said. “That was bad luck for me, because many of my colleagues have made a career out of having talked for five minutes with Borges.” These writers, he joked, “spend their life repeating, ‘Borges told me, Borges told me.’ ” I asked if Borges’s presence had been very strong in Buenos Aires when Aira first arrived as a young man. “Yes, of course,” he said, suddenly serious. “Of course. He was an immense presence.” When Borges died, in 1986, he said, “a light was gone.”
Later, I made the mistake of asking if Aira was especially moved by any of Borges’s characters. He seemed nonplussed. “Borges characters are not exactly human characters,” he said. “They’re literary characters.” Elaborating, he offered a small link to his own work. “Characters are not important,” he said. “For me, it’s the play, the literary play. And characters, in what I write, they’re necessary to advance the story.” But it’s the story that matters.
Many readers think of Aira’s work, like that of Borges before him, as sui generis. When I asked Aira if he agrees, or if he feels that Borges has influenced his writing, he responded, “I am thinking now that maybe . . . maybe all my work is a footnote to Borges.” I was a little surprised by this, and Aira sounded surprised, too, as if he were testing the idea’s truth. Borges was famously a fan of footnotes; a footnote to a body of footnoted works seems like a devious sort of tribute, almost Lex Luthor-like.
But Aira may not be in the best position to judge if his writing shows traces of Borges: one author whom Aira doesn’t read is himself. When we met, the translation of “Ema, the Captive” was under way, and Aira’s translator had been sending him queries. As he’d written the book thirty-seven years before, Aira’s recall of its finer points wasn’t perfect. “But I did not want to go to the book,” he said. “So I invented the answers.”
Alena Graedon is the author of “The Word Exchange,” a novel.
César Aira
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César Aira
Cesar Aira Wikipedia.jpg
Born 23 February 1949 (age 71)
Coronel Pringles, Buenos Aires Province, Argentina
Occupation Novelist, Short Story Writer, Essayist
César Aira (Argentine Spanish: [ˈsesaɾ ˈajɾa];[1] born 23 February 1949 in Coronel Pringles, Buenos Aires Province) is an Argentinian writer and translator, and an exponent of contemporary Argentinian literature. Aira has published over a hundred short books of stories, novels and essays. In fact, at least since 1993 a hallmark of his work is a truly frenetic level of writing and publication—two to five novella-length books each year.[2] He has lectured at the University of Buenos Aires, on Copi and Arthur Rimbaud, and at the University of Rosario on Constructivism and Stéphane Mallarmé, and has translated and edited books from France, England, Italy, Brazil, Spain, Mexico, and Venezuela.[3]
Contents
1 His work
2 Style
3 Awards and honours
4 Bibliography
4.1 Novels
4.2 Pamphlets and standalone short stories
4.3 Stories originally published in magazines
4.4 Short story collections
4.5 Essays and non-fiction
4.6 Works in English translation
4.7 Studies of Aira's work
5 References
6 External links
His work
Besides his fiction, and the translation work he does for a living, Aira also writes literary criticism, including monographic studies of Copi, the poet Alejandra Pizarnik, and the nineteenth-century British limerick and nonsense writer Edward Lear. He wrote a short book, Las tres fechas (The Three Dates), arguing for the central importance, when approaching some minor eccentric writers, of examining the moment of their lives about which they are writing, the date of completion of the work, and the date of publication of the work. Aira also was the literary executor of the complete works of his friend the poet and novelist Osvaldo Lamborghini (1940–1985).
Style
Aira has often spoken in interviews of elaborating an avant-garde aesthetic in which, rather than editing what he has written, he engages in a "flight forward" (fuga hacia adelante) to improvise a way out of the corners he writes himself into. Aira also seeks in his own work, and praises in the work of others (such as the Argentine-Parisian cartoonist and comic novelist Copi), the "continuum" (el continuo) of a constant momentum in the fictional narrative. As a result, his fictions can jump radically from one genre to another, and often deploy narrative strategies from popular culture and "subliterary" genres like pulp science fiction and television soap operas. He frequently refuses to conform to generic expectations for how a novel ought to end, leaving many of his fictions quite open-ended.
While his subject matter ranges from Surrealist or Dadaist quasi-nonsense to fantastic tales set in his Buenos Aires neighborhood of Flores, Aira also returns frequently to Argentina’s nineteenth century (two books translated into English, The Hare and An Episode in the Life of a Landscape Painter, are examples of this; so is the best-known novel of his early years, Ema la cautiva (Emma, the Captive)). He also returns regularly to play with stereotypes of an exotic East, such as in Una novela china, (A Chinese Novel); El volante (The Flyer), and El pequeño monje budista (The Little Buddhist Monk). Aira also enjoys mocking himself and his childhood home town, Coronel Pringles, in fictions such as Cómo me hice monja (How I Became a Nun), Cómo me reí (How I Laughed), El cerebro musical (The Musical Brain) and Las curas milagrosas del doctor Aira (The Miraculous Cures of Dr. Aira). His novella La prueba (1992) served as the basis—or point of departure, as only the first half-hour follows the novella—of Diego Lerman's film Tan de repente (Suddenly) (2002). His novel Cómo me hice monja (How I Became a Nun) was selected as one of the ten best publications in Spain in the year 1998.
Awards and honours
Konex Award - translation (1994)[4]
Konex Award - novel (2004)[4]
Prix Roger Caillois (2014)[5]
Neustadt International Prize for Literature - finalist (2014)[6]
Man Booker International Prize - finalist (2015)[7]
America Awards (2016)[8]
Manuel Rojas Ibero-American Narrative Award (2016)[9]
Bibliography
A partial bibliography:
Novels
Moreira (1975). Achával Solo
Ema, la cautiva (1981). Editorial de Belgrano
La luz argentina (1983). CEAL
El vestido rosa. Las ovejas (1984). Ada Korn Editora
Canto castrato (1984). Javier Vergara Editor
Una novela china (1987). Javier Vergara Editor
Los fantasmas (1990). Grupo Editor Latinoamericano
El bautismo (1991). Grupo Editor Latinoamericano
La liebre (1991). Emecé
Embalse (1992). Emecé
La guerra de los gimnasios (1992). Emecé
La prueba (1992). Grupo Editor Latinoamericano
El llanto (1992). Beatriz Viterbo
El volante (1992). Beatriz Viterbo
Diario de la hepatitis (1993). Bajo la luna nueva
Madre e hijo (1993). Bajo la luna Nueva
Cómo me hice monja (1993). Beatriz Viterbo
La costurera y el viento (1994). Beatriz Viterbo
Los misterios de Rosario (1994). Emecé
La fuente (1995). Beatriz Viterbo
Los dos payasos (1995). Beatriz Viterbo
La abeja (1996). Emecé
El mensajero (1996). Beatriz Viterbo
Dante y Reina (1997). Mate
El congreso de literatura (1997).
La serpiente (1998). Beatriz Viterbo
El sueño (1998). Emecé
Las curas milagrosas del Dr. Aira (1998).[10] Simurg
La mendiga (1998). Mondadori
Un episodio en la vida del pintor viajero (2000). Beatriz Viterbo
El juego de los mundos (2000). El Broche
Un sueño realizado (2001). Alfaguara
La villa (2001). Emecé
El mago (2002). Mondadori
Varamo (2002). Anagrama
Fragmentos de un diario en los Alpes (2002).[10] Beatriz Viterbo
La princesa Primavera (2003). Era
El tilo (2003).[10] Beatriz Viterbo
Las noches de Flores (2004). Mondadori
Yo era una chica moderna (2004). Interzona
Yo era una niña de siete años (2005). Interzona
Cómo me reí (2005). Beatriz Viterbo
Haikus (2005). Mate
El pequeño monje budista (2005). Mansalva
Parménides (2006). Alfaguara
La cena (2006). Beatriz Viterbo
Las conversaciones (2007). Beatriz Viterbo
La vida nueva (2007). Mansalva
Las aventuras de Barbaverde (2008). Mondadori
La confesión (2009). Beatriz Viterbo
El error (2010). Mondadori
Yo era una mujer casada (2010). Blatt & Ríos
Festival (2011). BAFICI
El marmol (2011). La Bestia Equilátera
El náufrago (2011). Beatriz Viterbo
Cecil Taylor (2011). Mansalva
Los dos hombres (2011). Urania
Entre los indios (2012). Mansalva
El testamento del Mago Tenor (2013). Emecé
Margarita (un recuerdo) (2013). Mansalva
El Ilustre Mago (2013). Ediciones Biblioteca Nacional
Artforum (2014). Blatt & Ríos
Actos de caridad (2014). Hueders
Biografía (2014). Mansalva, Buenos Aires
Triano (2015). Milena Caserola, Buenos Aires
La invención del tren fantasma (2015). Mansalva, Buenos Aires
El Santo (2015). Mondadori/Literatura Random House, Buenos Aires
Una aventura (2017). Editorial Mansalva, Buenos Aires
Eterna Juventud (2017). Hueders, Santiago de Chile
Saltó al otro lado (2017). Ediciones Urania, Buenos Aires
El gran misterio (2018). Blatt & Ríos, Buenos Aires
Un filósofo (2018). Iván Rosado, Rosario
Prins (2018). Random House, Buenos Aires
El presidente (2019). Mansalva, Buenos Aires
Pinceladas musicales (2019). Blatt & Ríos, Buenos Aires
Fulgentius (2020). Literatura Random House, Barcelona
Pamphlets and standalone short stories
El infinito (1994). Vanagloria Ediciones
La pastilla de hormona (2002). Belleza y Felicidad
Mil gotas (2003). Eloísa Cartonera
El cerebro musical (2005). Eloísa Cartonera
El todo que surca la nada (2006). Eloísa Cartonera
Picasso (2007). Belleza y Felicidad
El perro (2010). Belleza y Felicidad
El criminal y el dibujante (2010). Spiral Jetty
El té de Dios (2010). Mata-Mata
La Revista Atenea (2011). Sazón Ediciones Latinoamericanas
El hornero (2011). Sazón Ediciones Latinoamericanas
En el café (2011). Belleza y Felicidad[11]
A brick wall (2012). Del Centro
Stories originally published in magazines
"El té de Dios" (2011) in the Mexican edition of Playboy[12]
"El hornero" in Muela de Juicio magazine
"Pobreza" in Muela de Juicio magazine
"Los osos topiarios del Parque Arauco" in Paula magazine
Short story collections
La trompeta de mimbre (1998). Beatriz Viterbo
Tres historias pringlenses (2013). Ediciones Biblioteca Nacional
Relatos reunidos (2013). Mondadori
El cerebro musical (2016). Literatura Random House
Essays and non-fiction
Copi (1991). Beatriz Viterbo
Nouvelles Impressions du Petit-Maroc[13] (1991). Meet (French/Spanish bilingual)
Taxol: precedido de ‘Duchamp en México’ y ‘La broma’ (1997). Simurg
"La nueva escritura", La Jornada Semanal, Ciudad de México, 12 April 1998 (an English translation The New Writing, published in The White Review, July 2013)
Alejandra Pizarnik (1998). Beatriz Viterbo
Cumpleaños (2000, 2001). Mondadori – Autobiographical essay
Diccionario de autores latinoamericanos (2001). Emecé
Alejandra Pizarnik (2001). Ediciones Omega
Las tres fechas (2001). Beatriz Viterbo
Edward Lear (2004). Beatriz Viterbo
Pequeno manual de procedimentos (2007). Arte & Letra
Continuación de ideas diversas (2014). Ediciones Universidad Diego Portales
Sobre el arte contemporáneo seguido de En La Habana (2016). Literatura Random House
Works in English translation
The Hare (trans. Nick Caistor; 1997) ISBN 978-1-85242-291-2 (Serpent's Tail)
An Episode in the Life of a Landscape Painter (trans. Chris Andrews; 2006) ISBN 978-0-8112-1630-2 (New Directions)
How I Became a Nun (trans. Chris Andrews; 2007) ISBN 978-0-8112-1631-9 (New Directions)
Ghosts (trans. Chris Andrews; 2009) ISBN 978-0-8112-1742-2 (New Directions)
The Literary Conference (trans. Katherine Silver; 2010) ISBN 978-0-8112-1878-8 (New Directions)
The Seamstress and the Wind (trans. Rosalie Knecht; 2011) ISBN 978-0-8112-1912-9 (New Directions)
The Musical Brain (trans. Chris Andrews; 5 December 2011) in The New Yorker magazine
Varamo (trans. Chris Andrews; 2012) ISBN 978-0-8112-1741-5 (New Directions)
The Miracle Cures of Dr. Aira (trans. Katherine Silver; October 2012) ISBN 978-0-8112-1999-0 (New Directions)
The Hare (trans. Nick Caistor; June 2013) ISBN 978-0811220903 (New Directions)
Shantytown (trans. Chris Andrews; November 2013) ISBN 978-0811219112 (New Directions)
The Conversations (trans. Katherine Silver; June 2014) ISBN 978-0811221108 (New Directions)
Picasso (trans. Chris Andrews; 11 August 2014) in The New Yorker magazine
Cecil Taylor (trans. Chris Andrews; 13 February 2015) in BOMB magazine
The Musical Brain: And Other Stories (trans. Chris Andrews; March 2015) ISBN 978-0811220293 (New Directions)
Dinner (trans. Katherine Silver; October 2015) ISBN 978-0811221085 (New Directions)
Ema the Captive (trans. Chris Andrews; 6 December 2016) ISBN 978-0811219105 (New Directions)
The Little Buddhist Monk and The Proof (trans. Nick Castor) ISBN 978-0811221122, New Directions, US (2017)
The Little Buddhist Monk(trans. Nick Castor) ISBN 978-1908276988, And Other Stories, UK, (2017)
The Proof (trans. Nick Castor) ISBN 9781908276964, And Other Stories, UK (2017)
The Linden Tree (trans. Chris Andrews) ISBN 978-0811219082, New Directions, US (2018); As The Lime Tree ISBN 9781911508120, And Other Stories, UK (2018)
Birthday (trans. Chris Andrews) ISBN ISBN 978-0811219099, New Directions, US (2019); ISBN 978-1911508403, And Other Stories, UK (2019)
Artforum (trans. Katherine Silver) ISBN 978-0811229265, New Directions, US (2020)
Studies of Aira's work
Alfieri, Carlos, Conversaciones: Entrevistas a César Aira, Guillermo Cabrera Infante, Roger Chartier, Antonio Muñoz Molina, Ricardo Piglia y Fernando Savater (Buenos Aires: katz Editores, 2008), 199 pp.
Arambasin, Nella (ed.), Aira en réseau: Rencontre transdisciplinaire autour du roman de l’écrivain argentin César Aira Un episodio en la vida del pintor viajero / Un épisode dans la vie du peintre voyageur (Besançon: Presses universitaires de Franche-Comté, 2005), 151 pp.
Capano, Daniel A., "La voz de la nueva novela histórica: La estética de la clonación y de la aporía en La liebre de César Aira," in Domínguez, Mignon (ed.), Historia, ficción y metaficción en la novela latinoamericana contemporánea (Buenos Aires: Corregidor, 1996), pp. 91-119.
Contreras, Sandra, Las vueltas de César Aira (Rosario: Beatríz Viterbo Editora, 2002), 320 pp.
Decock, Pablo, "El transrealismo en la narrativa de César Aira," in Fabry, Geneviève, and Claudio Canaparo (eds.), El enigma de lo real: Las fronteras del realismo en la narrativa del siglo XX (Oxford and Bern: Lang, 2007), pp. 157-168.
Decock, Pablo, Las figuras paradojicas de Cesar Aira: Un estudio semiótico y axiológico de la estereotipia y la autofiguración (Bern: Peter Lang, 2014), 344 pp.
Estrin, Laura, César Aira: El realismo y sus extremos (Buenos Aires: Ediciones Del Valle, 1999), 79 pp.
Fernández, Nancy, Narraciones viajeras: César Aira y Juan José Saer (Buenos Aires: Editorial Biblos, 2000), 190 pp.
García, Mariano, Degeneraciones textuales: Los géneros en la obra de César Aira (Rosario: Beatríz Viterbo Editora / Consorcio de Editores, 2006), 320 pp.
Klinger, Diana Irene, Escritas de si, escritas do outro: O retorno do autor e a virada etnográfica: Bernardo Carvalho, Fernando Vallejo, Washington Cucurto, João Gilberto Noll, César Aira, Silviano Santigo (Rio de Janeiro: 7Letras, 2007), 187 pp.
Lafon, Michel, Cristina Breuil, Margarita Remón-Raillard, and Julio Premat (eds.), César Aira, Une Révolution (Grenoble: Université Stendhal — Grenoble 3, Tigre, 2005), 311 pp.
Mattoni, Silvio, "César Aira," in Arán, Pampa (et al.) (eds.), Umbrales y catástrofes: Literatura argentina de los '90 (Argentina: Epoké, 2003), 258 pp.
Peñate Rivero, Julio, "¿Una poética del viaje en la narrativa de César Aira?" in Peñate Rivero, Julio (ed.), Relato de viaje y literaturas hispánicas [Papers from an international colloquium organized by the University of Fribourg, May 2004] (Madrid: Visor Libros, 2004), pp. 333-351.
Pitol, Sergio, and Teresa García Díaz (eds.), César Aira en miniatura: Un acercamiento crítico (Xalpa, Veracruz: Instituto de Investigaciones Lingüístico-Literarias, Universidad Veracruzana, 2006), 188 pp.
Scramim, Susana, Literatura do presente: História e anacronismo dos textos (Chapecó: Argos Editora Universitária, 2007), 190 pp.
César Aira
César Aira was born in Coronel Pringles, Argentina in 1949, and has lived in Buenos Aires since 1967. He taught at the University of Buenos Aires (about Copi and Rimbaud) and at the University of Rosario (Constructivism and Mallarmé), and has translated and edited books from France, England, Italy, Brazil, Spain, Mexico, and Venezuela. Perhaps one of the most prolific writers in Argentina, and certainly one of the most talked about in Latin America, Aira has published more than eighty books to date in Argentina, Mexico, Colombia, Venezuela, Chile, and Spain, which have been translated for France, Great Britain, Italy, Brazil, Portugal, Greece, Austria, Romania, Russia, and now the United States. One novel, La prueba, has been made into a feature film, and How I Became a Nun was chosen as one of Argentina’s ten best books. Besides essays and novels Aira writes regularly for the Spanish newspaper El País. In 1996 he received a Guggenheim scholarship, in 2002 he was short listed for the Rómulo Gallegos prize, and has been shortlisted for the Man Booker International Prize.
QUOTE: "Aira fuses the magical realist elements with an early-era George Saundersian postmodern credulity, and the package is impossible to resist. His aptitude for wild plots, stuffed with thoughtful, odd characters only makes this attraction greater. ... Aira remains one of the most unique and enchanting writers alive."
César Aira. The Little Buddhist Monk & The Proof . New Directions.
César Aira is something of a magician. His short novels vary widely in subject matter and genre--in The Literary Conference , a city is destroyed by a giant worm while The Conversations is essentially just two friends discussing a movie but they are all undeniably his. More than anything, they're unified by his meticulous prose, which often lingers on what other writers might deem insignificant. Aira is perhaps the best there is at turning the trivial into the magnificent.
Such is the case for his newly translated novels, or novellas, if you prefer, The Little Buddhist Monk & The Proof . They are distinct, and though their combination is confusing, as New Directions has published shorter pieces than these two as individual physical objects, two new works by Aira are better than one.
The Little Buddhist Monk follows a Korean Buddhist monk (who is extremely little, small enough to be trampled on) as he spends the day with a pair of French tourists. They eat, drink, and eventually visit a temple together. Throughout all of this, Aira continually draws the focus back to the smallness of his main character, always tweaking his position toward it.
It would be unfair to reduce him to his physical dimensions, because they
had been able to appreciate his intellectual and human capabilities, and
something like friendship had grown up between them. They understood
him perfectly, and yet in some (indefinable) way his size still gave rise
to the doubt: who exactly did they understand so well? How?
This encapsulates one of the joys of reading Aira's work. He is always aware that passages such as this do the opposite of what they are meant (in a literal sense) to do. Mentioning his stature, even in an effort to minimize its importance, brings it to the forefront, and thus traps readers in the same dilemma as his characters.
More so than in any other Aira book, though, portions of this drag a little bit. One of the French tourists is a photographer, and when Aira turns his eye toward the process of his setting up, things slow down. It pays off eventually, but it's jarring for any portion of an (about) ninety-page novella to slow down, especially from a writer so engrossing. Still, there is perhaps nobody who writes endings more interesting than does Aira, and that is equally the case with The Little Buddhist Monk .
The second novella, The Proof , begins with a simple question-"wannafuck?"--to which Aira delays an answer for almost six pages. It's a confident move that benefits from taking place ninety pages into the book rather than on page one, and it is worth it, too. In between question and answer, Aira immerses readers in Mareia and her world.
Marcia is on her daily walk around Plaza Flores in Buenos Aires, ruminating on what is going on around her. She observes the way the social groups ebb and flow and notices the music coming from the nearby record shops. She also thinks about the oddness of how sunset changes throughout the year, and what that means for the abstract ideas of day and night.
Every look, every voice she slipped past mingled with the night. Because
It was night. The day was over and night was in the world; at this hour in
summer it was still broad daylight; but now it was night. Not the kind of
night for sleeping, the real one, but a night superimposed on the day
because it was winter.
In this passage, Marcia's fascination with the way people acquiesce to their surroundings is rendered well, and its an important idea to have at the fore when the woman who yelled "wannafuck?" comes back in to ask again. The proposi-tioner, who goes by Mao, and her friend, Lenin, are not keen to let the question go unanswered. Mao is convinced that she loves her and wants to have sex with her, or perhaps, a threesome. They duck into a restaurant where they talk and harass a few employees before leaving to go stick up a supermarket. The story takes a similar form to some of his other books, like The Literary Conference or Dinner , in the way it transforms from the abnormal to the shocking, and nobody walks the line better.
Aira fuses the magical realist elements with an early-era George Saundersian postmodern credulity, and the package is impossible to resist. His aptitude for wild plots, stuffed with thoughtful, odd characters only makes this attraction greater. In The Little Buddhist Monk and The Proof specifically, these are on display. Compared to The Miracle Cures of Dr. Aira or The Literary Conference , it leaves a little to be desired, but only a little. Aira remains one of the most unique and enchanting writers alive.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 University of Nebraska Press
http://www.nebraskapress.unl.edu/
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Babendir, Bradley. "Cesar Aira. The Little Buddhist Monk & The Proof." Prairie Schooner, vol. 91, no. 4, 2017, p. 190+. Gale General OneFile, https://link.gale.com/apps/doc/A521048516/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=839a581e. Accessed 6 July 2020.
QUOTE: "a search for authentic thrills," as well as a “magnificent reappraisal of what [Aria] is up to now aesthetically."
César Aira
Prins
Barcelona. Literatura Random House. 2018. 137 pages.
Depending on who keeps count and what his various publishers do, Prins is César Airas 101st book and 71st novel, and by the time this review is published, there will be more of his challenging prose. Praised by Patti Smith for reasons similar to her acclaim of Bolaño, the sole living Argentine master habitually makes incompleteness and opacity an ingenious contrapuntal homage to his sometime masters. Afflicting the comfortable, he avers that breaks with the past, like the Duchampian avant-garde he favors, may not be as radical as believed. He also assays realism in theory and practice--finding no paradox in preferring it to commercial fiction--and asserts he doesn't read younger contemporaries.
Prins is a search for authentic thrills, like many of Airas previous short novels. If the "autobiographical" is difficult to confirm in them, like Prins, the recent Una Aventura and El gran misterio can be termed homeopathic performances, a detectable turn in most of his novels available in English translation. Even when there is no empirical "there" there, a bifurcated "César Aira" pops up, dazzlingly compulsive and hilarious in his novelistic trials. Given that backdrop, Prins and its loose plot reveal a subtext: the healing power of literature as a topic of concern for literati worldwide, from Walser to Aira and motley millenials.
Like the narrators in El gran misterio , Airas goal is not to knock down doors but to try many keys at random, reduce the unknown, but not before analyzing whatever "the great mystery" is. In that regard, Prins surges from an urban legend, the architect Arturo Prins, whose plan to build a gothic university in downtown Buenos Aires about a century ago displeased him and everyone involved, aesthetically and financially. Frustrated by his uncompleted masterwork and bad luck, he killed himself.
Aira turns that story into one about a writer of commercial gothic novels who, aware of his work's puerility, stops writing. He spends his time consuming opium, delivered by a dealer adamant to stay in the narrators house indefinitely. Meanwhile, his ghostwriters have become a criminal Buenos Aires gang that acts according to standard gothic tales they had written before (in interviews Aira states he has read every gothic story).
Within that story there are quibbles and pontifications about what literature is or what a writer does and of course about the avant-garde as a kind of sabotage. Humor, along the lines of Buster Keaton and Monty Python during a bus trip across central Buenos Aires with a stranger named Alicia (following a real route that Aira takes), and sensuality are not absent from those digressions; nor is the sense that Aira is going somewhere by going nowhere, since after all he is contributing to the commercialization of other conventions.
If "it's complicated" could summarize Aira's writing, Prins is a magnificent reappraisal of what he is up to now aesthetically, which is summarized in the last sentence as creating worlds in which reality has little to do with what he has called "dreamlike realism" and more with a novelist's efforts to preserve his genius in a world that can know everything.
Will H. Corral
Madrid, Spain
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2019 University of Oklahoma
http://www.worldliteraturetoday.com
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Corral, Will H. "Cesar Aira: Prins." World Literature Today, vol. 93, no. 1, 2019, p. 99+. Gale General OneFile, https://link.gale.com/apps/doc/A569756103/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=dbed9d99. Accessed 6 July 2020.
QUOTE: A marvelous little collection about compulsion, obsession, and the extraordinary joy that a simple pleasure can bring.
Aira, Cesar ARTFORUM New Directions (Adult Fiction) $12.95 3, 31 ISBN: 978-0-8112-2926-5
A collection of stories about one writer's obsession with, of all things, a magazine, attainable but difficult to find in a way he often finds maddening.
Argentinian writer Aira (Birthday, 2019, etc.) has produced more than 100 books, a good number of which have been translated into English. His works tend to be slim and offbeat--a zombie novel here (Dinner, 2015), a kidnapping there (Ema the Captive, 2016)--but they're always eminently readable. Even this one, which is, yes, pretty much about hunting down a magazine and then, after having taken out a subscription, waiting for it to come in the mail. Is this fiction, as it's labeled, or nonfiction? Aira's work is so personal and frequently peculiar that it doesn't make much of a difference. He's spent a couple of decades thinking about Artforum, judging by the dates at the end of each story--not so much about the magazine's content as his difficult quest to obtain it. Naturally, he turns each interaction into a beautifully crafted experience, even in the most banal circumstances. Take the opener, "The Sacrifice," written in 1983, in which an issue of Artforum saves the narrator's other diligently acquired magazines from a particularly vicious rainstorm. Later there are contemplations of the magazine's price, translated here by Silver as $10, and the personal glory of finally getting a subscription. In 2002, a short-tempered writer goes searching for a trove of Artforums spotted, by happenstance, by a friend. "Conjectures" and "Melancholy" describe the narrator's state of mind while he waits impatiently for the next issue to arrive in the mail. The writer's obsession with the magazine is also explained in the context of his life, in which he's always had "the problem of empty time, of ominous afternoons like the open mouth of an abyss." This book is a slim affair, but for those who want to understand the mindset of an authentic collector, it comes straight from the heart.
A marvelous little collection about compulsion, obsession, and the extraordinary joy that a simple pleasure can bring.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2020 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
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"Aira, Cesar: ARTFORUM." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Jan. 2020. Gale General OneFile, https://link.gale.com/apps/doc/A611140301/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=667e7ea9. Accessed 6 July 2020.
QUOTE: "As Aira illuminates the dead ends in his drive to collect the magazine, he offers rich insight into the appreciation of art and the desire to possess," noted a Publishers Weekly reviewer. "This entertaining jaunt through the writer's creative development satisfies with its brevity and grace."
Artforum
Cesar Aira, trans. from the Spanish by Katherine Silver. New Directions, $12.95 trade paper (80p) ISBN 978-0-8112-2926-5
Aira's clever, whimsical collection of autofiction (after The Musical Brain) draws on the author's obsessive 30-year-long pursuit of collecting the international art magazine Artforum. Initially able to obtain issues in Argentina only by chance, Aira comes to believe the glossy objects are enchanted by "divine automatism", after one volume shape-shifts into a form resembling a soccer ball, having absorbed the rain from an open window and keeping his other magazines dry, "like a magical and heroic solider." After exhausting a search for copies in local bookstores, he orders a subscription, only to face an interminable wait for new issues. As they trickle in from the U.S., he begins counting down the days to each issue's expected arrival date. He travels to a used bookstore in Buenos Aires to buy a stack of back issues that belonged to a dead gallery owner, and as his patience grows thin, he decides to make his own version of the magazine. As Aira illuminates the dead ends in his drive to collect the magazine, he offers rich insight into the appreciation of art and the desire to possess. This entertaining jaunt through the writer's creative development satisfies with its brevity and grace. (Mar.)
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2019 PWxyz, LLC
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"Artforum." Publishers Weekly, vol. 266, no. 51, 16 Dec. 2019, p. 89. Gale General OneFile, https://link.gale.com/apps/doc/A610419903/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=86a00041. Accessed 6 July 2020.
QUOTE: A Kirkus Reviews contributor found the writing "whimsical, humorous, and poignant by turns." The contributor concluded: "A fanciful contemplation of the writer's life that is not quite a novel or a memoir but a whimsical combination of the two."
Aira, Cesar BIRTHDAY New Directions (Adult Fiction) $13.95 2, 26 ISBN: 978-0-8112-1909-9
One of Argentina's most talented and celebrated iconoclasts meditates on his 50th birthday.
The wildly prolific writer Aira (The Linden Tree, 2018, etc.) looks back on his life in the wake of his 50th birthday--with a book that's published in English to coincide with his 70th. As per his modus operandi, it's a slim but thoughtful affair, punctuated by numerous bons mots, acidic self-deprecation, and cutting observations about the world around him. It starts with a mundane quarrel with his wife--"who doesn't always appreciate my sense of humor"--about the phases of the moon and proceeds apace. "It would be less dramatic, but much more plausible, to say that it wasn't a moment but a process: the process of wasting time, which is long by its very nature," Aira writes. "At my age, it's impossible to contemplate the eternities of time that I wasted in my youth without a certain horror....The hours, the days, the years, the decades squandered. And it is poetically just, in a way, that the apparent victim should have been the moon, that poetic reminder of wasted time." It's a trifle when compared to the author's body of work, but it's an eminently readable one, rife with keen observations about passers-by, notes about the author's unique style and why it changed over time, and ruminations on how the author has dealt with the inscrutable eventualities of aging. As with all this writer's outlandish novels, numbering nearly 100 by this point, the writing is whimsical, humorous, and poignant by turns. Yet there's still a finality by the end that readers of Aira's age may find painfully true: "To write, you have to be young; to write well, you have to be a young prodigy. By the time you get to fifty, much of that energy and precision is gone."
A fanciful contemplation of the writer's life that is not quite a novel or a memoir but a whimsical combination of the two.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2018 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
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"Aira, Cesar: BIRTHDAY." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Dec. 2018. Gale General OneFile, https://link.gale.com/apps/doc/A565423078/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=b0de5344. Accessed 6 July 2020.
QUOTE: . "Fans of Aira may gain occasional insight into his writerly preoccupations," noted a Publishers Weekly reviewer, "but the seemingly random jumps between recollections prevent an edifying portrait of the novelist as a young man from emerging."
The Linden Tree
Cesar Aira, trans, from the Spanish by Chris Andrews. New Directions, $13.95 trade paper (128p) ISBN 978-0-8112-1908-2
Aira (Dinner) reveals little of substance in this haphazard "true account" of his upbringing in Pringles, Argentina. "I was born in 1949, at the climax of the Peronist regime," Aira writes; he describes how the iconic (and infamous) presidency of Juan Peron roiled his parents' marriage. Aira's father ("a staunch Peronist") develops a deep ambivalence about life after Peron's government falls. His mother, conversely, becomes an anti-Peronist given to "defamatory and truly delirious" rants. Aira offers clues about the underlying causes of his parents' supposedly political disagreement (including his father's rumored affair), but is more focused on presenting an array of charming but minimally engaging anecdotes. Moths hang from the kitchen ceiling "like little Chinese lanterns," and a statue with a bared breast is erected in the town plaza. Fans of Aira may gain occasional insight into his writerly preoccupations from these discursions, but the seemingly random jumps between recollections prevent an edifying portrait of the novelist as a young man from emerging. While explaining his inclusion of a favored game, Aira wonders, "who can say what might turn out to be important?" This novella cannot overcome his disinclination to make decisions about such crucial questions. (Apr.)
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2018 PWxyz, LLC
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"The Linden Tree." Publishers Weekly, vol. 265, no. 9, 26 Feb. 2018, p. 62+. Gale General OneFile, https://link.gale.com/apps/doc/A530637403/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=61a5281d. Accessed 6 July 2020.
QUOTE: A funny, sardonic, and richly emotional journey through one man's interior experience.
Aira, Cesar THE LINDEN TREE New Directions (Adult Fiction) $13.95 4, 24 ISBN: 978-0-8112-1908-2
An ethereal ramble through the sweet haze of nostalgia by the prolific Argentinean writer Aira (The Little Buddhist Monk & The Proof, 2017, etc.).
When is memory not true? If we can only live our lives in one direction, how can we ever learn from our future? These are the heady ideas Aira seals firmly in a fictional memoir that finds him sauntering through the past of a man nearly exactly like him. The unnamed narrator was born in 1949, the same year as the author, in the same provincial town of Coronel Pringles, and now, like Aira, he is living in Buenos Aires. He begins by telling the story of his parents: his father, a tall, handsome black man so nervous he might die of fright; his mother a disabled woman of European descent with a wicked sense of humor. Our narrator has inherited his father's nervous disposition, suffering with unbending anxiety. "Death is no solution because my corpse would get up too," he says. "What can I do? It's beyond my control, I can't help it." In a history laced slightly with the history of Peronism, Aira paints a colorful picture of his past along with a couple of pointed lessons about storytelling. In the first, he declares, "If you think about it, everything is allegory. One thing signifies another, even the fact that I have ended up becoming a writer and composing this true account." In another, he watches his father struggle with the writer's experience. "It's all in reverse," says his father. "That's what it is. The writer has to live life in reverse." We learn the adult Aira has spent his whole life pondering this statement, trying to reconstruct his father's reasoning, finally setting off to rediscover his old self.
A funny, sardonic, and richly emotional journey through one man's interior experience.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2018 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
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"Aira, Cesar: THE LINDEN TREE." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Feb. 2018. Gale General OneFile, https://link.gale.com/apps/doc/A527248252/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=f596d378. Accessed 6 July 2020.
QUOTE: "Two unnerving, challenging stories about identity sparked by subtle delights and surprising ends."
Aira, Cesar THE LITTLE BUDDHIST MONK & THE PROOF New Directions (Adult Fiction) $15.95 5, 30 ISBN: 978-0-8112-2112-2
A pair of eerie, minimalist novellas by the gifted Argentinean writer Aira (Ema the Captive, 2016, etc.).Shades of The Twilight Zone and Quentin Tarantino's cinematic blood baths linger over these two unnerving novellas, neither of which is anything like the other. In The Little Buddhist Monk, Aira introduces us to a diminutive but endlessly curious Korean monk who dreams of going to Europe or America. If there is a central motif to the work, it is a meditation on the nature of dreams. "Practical people say that dreams serve no purpose; but they can't deny that at least they allow one to dream," the monk muses, later remembering, "It costs nothing to dream." In due course, the monk meets French photographer Napoleon Chirac and his cartoonist wife, Jacqueline Bloodymary, becoming their guide to the country's shrines. It should come as no surprise to Aira's readers that the monk, his dreams, and indeed his very reality turn out to be not what they appear. The follow-up novella, The Proof, finds Aira back in more familiar territory with a story set in Buenos Aires, but its conclusion is no less shocking. The story seems designed to shock, as two punk-rock lesbians brace timid Marcia in the street with a startling query, "Wannafuck?" In trying to figure out "Mao" and "Lenin," Marcia finds herself enraptured in a dangerous game, as the two challenge and taunt her bourgeois assumptions about the world. "You are the nihilist," Mao tells Marcia. "Could you really spend your time talking crap, worried about the kind of things that happen here, in this hamburger microcosm? All of this is accidental, nothing more than the springboard to launch us back to what is important." By the time Marcia joins Mao and Lenin in launching a violent attack on a supermarket, she may or may not be experiencing Stockholm syndrome, but there's no doubt she is fundamentally changed. Two unnerving, challenging stories about identity sparked by subtle delights and surprising ends.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
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"Aira, Cesar: THE LITTLE BUDDHIST MONK & THE PROOF." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Mar. 2017. Gale General OneFile, https://link.gale.com/apps/doc/A485105146/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=63a93a87. Accessed 6 July 2020.
QUOTE: "[r]eaders of magic realism will appreciate Aira's reliance on inventive absurdities and his theme of the quest for identity."
Aira, Cesar. The Little Buddhist Monk & The Proof. New Directions. May 2017. 178p. tr. from Spanish by Katherine Silver. ISBN 9780811221122. pap. $14.95. F
One of the most popular and prolific contemporary Argentine authors, Aira has written more than 90, mostly shorter, books, only a handful of which have been translated into English (Ema the Captive). This volume collects two novellas. In "The Little Buddhist Monk," dating from 2005, a diminutive monk wants to leave his native Korea for the West. Luckily, he runs into a tall, fat French photographer and his cartoonist wife, who hire him as their tour guide to Korean temples, but his hope of having them take him back home with them is dashed when they abandon him. This mythical world repeats Aira's penchant for satire and digressions, this time into the history of the Korean alphabet. In an altogether different vein is the earlier and more somber "The Proof" (1992). Two lesbian punks, Mao and Lenin, wanting to seduce the adolescent Marcia, first spend time conversing in a cafe, and then, to prove what love is, commit a violently homicidal act in a grocery store before the three escape. VERDICT Readers of magic realism will appreciate Aira's reliance on inventive absurdities and his theme of the quest for identity (the characters may not be what they seem) in these two very disparate tales.--Lawrence Olszewski, North Central State Coll., Mansfield, OH
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 Library Journals, LLC. A wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
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Source Citation
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Olszewski, Lawrence. "Aira, Cesar. The Little Buddhist Monk & The Proof." Library Journal, vol. 142, no. 3, 15 Feb. 2017, p. 85. Gale General OneFile, https://link.gale.com/apps/doc/A481649099/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=0725b560. Accessed 6 July 2020.
QUOTE: "Ema has a fierceness that makes her compelling," commented a Kirkus Reviews critic, who further called this a "poetic, languorous tale." The critic concluded: "An elegant, almost ethereal story of one woman's survival."
Cesar Aira, Chris Andrews EMA THE CAPTIVE New Directions (Adult Fiction) 13.95 ISBN: 978-0-8112-1910-5
A nearly 40-year-old novel by one of Argentinas most prolific writers, finally available in translation. Translating a decades-old novel may seem redundant, but this title is helped by the fact that its a historical story and also because it reveals the first blush of talent by Aira (Dinner, 2015, etc.), who remains one of his countrys most nimble practitioners. This languid exploration of a life lived in slavery is set in the late 19th century; the title character is a young mother who's captured on the road by a group of rough-hewn soldiers in the company of Duval, a French engineer bound for a remote fort. Aira creates a bit of literary alchemy by opening the book with the soldiers rather than their captive and then letting Ema completely hijack the narrative; by the time the novel ends some years later, she has fully captured the imagination of her creator and somehow inhabits a world of her own choosing. Shes an interesting character, offering different things to different captors. To Duval, shes a tiny, dark, deranged cloud, while to subsequent lovers and husbands, she appears very differently. She is protective of her children, including her young son and two subsequent little girls. But Ema also remains largely aloof as a character, merely the medium through which Aira spins his poetic, languorous tale. What Ema mostly wants is to see the world for what it is; she possesses a desire to grasp the secret of the present, to penetrate the eternal unity of life and see the systems undulating veil. Appearing in a story that's largely about lawlessness and casual sexuality, Ema has a fierceness that makes her compelling. Aira is part of a long tradition of revising Argentina's "authentic" history, but his immense talent makes that process seamless to readers. An elegant, almost ethereal story of one womans survival.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 Kirkus Media LLC
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"Cesar Aira, Chris Andrews: EMA THE CAPTIVE." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Oct. 2016. Gale General OneFile, https://link.gale.com/apps/doc/A465181959/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=c76437d4. Accessed 6 July 2020.
QUOTE: "Never tedious, always thoughtful, Aira's prose moves with great agility and effortless depth."
Ema the Captive
Cesar Aira, trans. from the Spanish by Chris Andrews. New Directions, $13.95 trade paper (240p) ISBN 978-0-8112-1910-5
Chris Andrews's adept translation of this early Aira (The Musical Brain) novel exhibits the cunning brilliance of one of Latin America's most critically acclaimed authors. In 19th-century Argentina, Ema is transported to a frontier fort as a government prisoner. Later, during an attack on the fort, native tribesmen abduct Ema. She then spends years roaming indigenous kingdoms as a captive and a concubine. The story of Ema's adaptability and perseverance evolves into an exploration of conflicts between human development and nature. The book succeeds in its rich, often tangential descriptions of Ema's odyssey. Aira gradually widens the scope of the narrative through drifting "storms of thought." At times philosophical, he relates distant settings and dire situations with astute observations on humanity. Although this is one of Aira's more conventional novels, the book still demonstrates his playful and spontaneous style. Characters are often introduced and not given a name or description until much later, tones can shift dramatically in a single page, and the sense that anything could happen is present in every paragraph. The result is a substantive novel that moves quickly and often feels improvisational. This unpredictability aids the narrative by mirroring the instability in Ema's life as she navigates an environment plagued by violence. Never tedious, always thoughtful, Aira's prose moves with great agility and effortless depth. (Dec.)
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 PWxyz, LLC
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"Ema the Captive." Publishers Weekly, vol. 263, no. 37, 12 Sept. 2016, p. 30. Gale General OneFile, https://link.gale.com/apps/doc/A464046219/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=31e6d97e. Accessed 6 July 2020.
In Cesar Aira's Latest, 'Artforum' Has A Magic Beyond The Page
April 12, 20207:00 AM ET
KAMIL AHSAN
Artforum
Artforum
by César Aira
Paperback, 82 pagespurchase
What do people do with their old magazines? I've often wondered why it is that the décor mavens of the world have not devised a clever way for me to show off my old New Yorkers the way I can my books. Piled on top of one another, they droop and ultimately slide right off. It's a nightmare. London Review of Books has a good solution: A pricey binder in which one can place old copies by curling strings around the centerfolds. The binder, then, goes on the bookshelf.
But for my old New Yorkers, I've devised a ritual that allows me to avoid thinking about them. I put copies at least a year old into a bag which I seal. I take a few days to forget about them, then throw the bag in the recycling bin.
Many people I know just let their New Yorkers accumulate endlessly. I'd happily do that too, if I hadn't many other subscriptions and didn't feel so guilty sacrificing them for old New Yorkers. I do not subscribe to Artforum, the subject and title of César Aira's newest novella — translated by Katherine Silver — but if I did, its supposed magical properties would solve a lot of my problems.
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The anxious possessor of these magazines (Aira himself) realizes early on in the novella that it has begun to rain, and he has left a window open next to a pile of magazines. He rushes into the living room. "In a way, I had already foreseen the worst," he professes. On top of the pile, he sees a "sphere the size of a soccer ball ... The ball was the Artforum, its surface was the cover ... It was cold and wet to the touch, very heavy, despite being full of water. Though difficult to admit, the only explanation was that it had absorbed the rain until it had acquired the perfectly spherical shape."
Aira is unencumbered. He does what he does, and what we receive is giddy, unquestionably self-indulgent, and yet absolutely perfect.
As it turns out, though, Artforum has a strange property: All the other magazines are, somehow, perfectly dry! "Artforum had sacrificed itself to save the other magazines, like a magical and heroic soldier stepping out in front of his platoon under a barrage of firepower and receiving all the bullets in his body without letting a single one hit his companions."
What a sentence! Is there any other writer who can get away with such overshot, brazen hyperbole? Aira is unencumbered. He does what he does, and what we receive is giddy, unquestionably self-indulgent, and yet absolutely perfect. "I woke up from my reverie staring at the spherical Artforum, from which I had not moved my eyes," he writes, pontificating on Artforum as a martyr for pages on end. "Did it love me?" he asks. What a thought! Did the Eiffel Tower love the woman who married it?
Aira famously does not revise his work. He just keeps on writing. The Artforum situation opens up into a philosophical inquiry about animism and the origins of nostalgia and longing. Aira uses a sort of technique one finds not in writing workshops but in comedy improv: Take a ludicrous and specific thing. Then fashion it into a disquisition on the condition of man. Or whatever.
The silliness doesn't stop there, it blooms and creates new branches. Aira writes about how he subscribed to Artforum in the first place. The magazine sends him a personal note — "best wishes for you in Argentina" — and Aira takes this to mean that with the political and economic tumult of his country, they must have found it a bit odd that an Argentinian would subscribe to a "sophisticated art magazine." Then he waits, month after month, but the magazine does not arrive. He suspects theft at the post office, then receives a tip about old issues at a store. Finally he gets 24 copies and is euphoric. "Here I must say that pens are my only other passion that can compete in my soul with what I feel for Artforum."
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Literary critics often find Aira difficult to pin down. There's an understandable struggle to understand what the shtick is all about. But for me personally, there's no need to wonder, for Aira is a remarkably direct writer. In novella after novella, he explains his motives plainly. So it happens in Artforum too:
The conclusion I hoped to reach ... with this story was the following: the most dissimilar facts can be connected in such a way that they participate in the same story, and their incoherence can become coherent. If you get a call for the wrong number, it's going to rain. If a pigeon alights on the balcony rail, there's going to be a subway strike. If a country changes its name, a relative is going to die ...There are no restrictions, there are no there are no forbidden subjects.
For a novella like Artforum, one doesn't need to reach deep into the toolkit of literary theory. Aira creates his own epistemology. It's marvelous to witness.
Ultimately, the Artforums cease to arrive yet again, and Aira descends into profound melancholy. I shan't spoil the lessons he imparts — but suffice it to say Aira departs far from the initial quandary. The only answer he does not provide is what I'm supposed to do with all my old New Yorkers.
Kamil Ahsan is a biologist, historian and writer based in New Haven. He is an editor at Barrelhouse and his work has appeared in the Los Angeles Review of Books, The American Prospect, Salon and Chicago Review.
Review: César Aira, a novelist of obsession worth obsessing over
The novelist César Aira in Buenos Aires, Argentina.
The novelist César Aira in Buenos Aires, Argentina.(Ricardo Ceppi/Ricardo Ceppi/Getty Images)
By TYLER MALONE
APRIL 1, 20208 AM
Sui generis is really the only way to accurately describe César Aira, the Argentine author who somehow manages to write a handful of novels every year. But not only is he unlike any other author; each book he publishes — and there are more than 100 — seems entirely unique. In “Episode in the Life of a Landscape Painter,” Aira fictionalizes the biography of real-life 19th century German documentary painter Johann Moritz Rugendas. In “Dinner,” he invites us to feast on a zombie apocalypse. He’s by turns a realist, a magical realist and a surrealist — and therefore not really any of them. Anything can happen in an Aira novel, and almost everything does.
His most recent book to be translated into English, “Artforum,” is about a man in Buenos Aires who loves the magazine Artforum. Ostensibly it is a collection of stories (or a novel? a diary?) wherein each narrative unit (story? chapter? journal entry?) directly or indirectly takes that hip and long-lived American art journal as its subject. But fixated as it is on Artforum, it’s really a book about artforms.
In an attempt to connect Aira to an artistic lineage, Chilean author Roberto Bolaño claimed that Aira’s novels “seem to put the theories of Gombrowicz into practice.” Witold Gombrowicz, the Polish writer who emigrated to Argentina just before the outbreak of World War II, was interested in the dance between form and formlessness, in obsessive but doomed quests for meaning, in ever more expansive webs of intricate (though perhaps imagined) connective tissue. Gombrowicz’s novel “Cosmos” follows a man named Witold who finds a dead bird hanging by a string, a discovery that sets into motion a series of connections and consequences — a minor cosmos.
Like many of Gombrowicz’s protagonists, the narrator of “Artforum” resembles his author, and he too is fixated on the cosmic connections, divine structures and numinous meanings that can erupt from ordinary objects and situations. The narrator gets tips from friends about where to find back issues of the magazine, fishes around in bookstores, signs up for a subscription after years of hemming and hawing, develops a new method for numbering the days while waiting for his sacred treasures to arrive by mail and even fantasizes about creating his own issues.
Throughout the book the narrator waxes poetic on idiosyncratic ideas like “form fatigue” (the “natural wearing away” of forms) and the “divine automatism” of things. Both are embodied by an issue of Artforum that he claims sacrificed itself to save a stack of other magazines from the rain, “like a magical and heroic soldier … taking all the bullets in his body without letting a single one hit his companions.”
Even when his obsession wanes, a random image or sound might bring the magazine back to his mind. The less obvious the connection, the sharper the invocation: “It could be a leaf falling from a tree, the blast of a car horn, some children playing ball in the plaza, the color of the sky at dawn. It came accompanied by a vague sense of futility, which was also futile.”
To him, the magazine is more than the sum of its parts — or rather, the form is what gives the parts meaning. “I realized that if I were offered the entire content of Artforum without Artforum, I wouldn’t be interested,” Aira writes. Over the decades of his obsession, there emerge connections and conjectures, “ad hoc causalities” and “small allusive folklores” — an “entire complex of representation”
Aira is interested in how we create our obsessions and how our obsessions create us. It’s a reciprocal process — for him and for the reader, who must also make webs of meaning out of the odd, ambiguous forms his stories take.
Of the dozens of books Aira has published, few are longer than 100 pages. He has argued that “the thicker a book is, the less literature it contains.” This absurd claim betrays one of Aira’s greatest gifts, which he shares with the narrator of “Artforum”: his “ability to find contentment in small things, in minimums, including minimums of meaning.”
With these intricate miniatures, Aira seems to have invented his own minor artform, an object as distinctive in size, shape and structure as those “almost square” issues of Artforum. His method, which he calls “fuga hacia adelante” (“fleeing forward”), involves never writing for more than an hour a day and rarely going back to revise those bursts of text. Whatever corner he has written himself into, he must improvise a way out of through propulsive improvisation.
In “Artforum,” the narrator describes the same method — writing for an hour and then waiting for the next day: “My work as a writer was a constant repetition of time’s surrender to waiting.” Aira’s fans, too, surrender to waiting — waiting for the next book as the narrator waits for the next Artforum; they come frequently but never frequently enough.
The new novel won’t disappoint those fans, but for the uninitiated, is “Artforum” a good place to start? As with most random issues of a great magazine, it’s as good a place to start as any. It represents the oeuvre while subverting it in idiosyncratic particulars. It may not be Aira’s best, but to speak of “bests” is to miss the point of Aira. His novels are more meaningful when taken together, each a shard of the same symbolic object. “Artforum” is a minor work that creates a minor cosmos, and in so doing feels — like the rest of Aira, and the best of art — major.
Artforum
César Aira
New Directions: 80 pages, $13.95
Malone is a writer based in Southern California.
QUOTE: "something dry, almost aseptic
Birthday by César Aira
May 14, 2019 Bailey Trela
Birthday
by César Aira
translated by Chris Andrews
New Directions, 2019
,Birthday by César Aira translated by Chris Andrews, New Directions, 2019, https://www.ndbooks.com/book/birthday/
The Argentinian writer César Aira is famous for his absurd prolificity; since the early nineties, he’s published a handful of novellas every year. From a marketing standpoint, this output is a dream. His seemingly mass-produced novellas often have exciting, semi-fabulist premises (like Dinner, an artsy take on the zombie apocalypse); they come in a guaranteeably palatable length (about 90 pages), and, by virtue of Aira’s gadarene process of composition, which eschews any preoccupations with literary style, are fairly quick and painless to translate.
With many of his relatively traditional, story-driven works having already appeared in English, the emphasis in translating Aira seems to have turned to his more reflective, and reflexive, works. This February saw the release of Birthday, a strange sort of author’s manifesto, and an apologia for Aira’s own discursiveness. Essentially, Birthday is an attempt by the author to get control of his mind, to come to terms with his greatest weakness: “distraction.” The ironic underpinning of the work, of course, is that Aira’s yen for distraction is part of the generative force behind his writings, and one of the main reasons for his fame.
Birthday, like many of Aira’s writings, is basically structureless. Famously, Aira doesn’t revise his writings—he follows his pinballing thoughts and surmises wherever they lead him, refusing to reverse course when he’s launched himself into a plot hole, instead forging blindly ahead, arriving, by this method, at a playful form of literary invention. Birthday begins with an evening in the fiftieth year of Aira’s life, when he discovers, on a moonlit walk with his wife, that a certain fact about the moon that he’d long taken for granted is in fact completely wrong, likely nothing more than a childhood supposition that had gone unexamined in his mind for decades.
Aira vows to discover the exact moment when he’d settled on this false theory, though that task, which is essentially impossible (“That faraway past is an inextricable blend of forgetting and invention, from which stray fragments emerge by chance”) and anyway pointless, quickly falls by the wayside, as Aira uses it to springboard a broader investigation into the origins of his “failure” at life, and the ways in which this failure influenced his style of writing. “My main fault, and the root of all the others,” he writes, “is the lack of a stable and predictable rhythm in which acts and ideas would find their places one after another.”
What Aira ultimately longs for is continuity of expression, and the continuity of consciousness that would come with it: “I would like to have style; if I did, all my experiences would be connected; my acts and thoughts would follow one another for a reason, not just by chance or on a whim.” As it is, though, he’s unequipped to write continuously: “My style is irregular: scatterbrained, spasmodic, jokey—necessarily jokey because I have to justify the unjustifiable by saying that I didn’t mean it seriously.” This description goes a long way towards explaining why Aira, with his unsatisfactory armchair theorizing, can sometimes come off as a lazy ironist; the self-conscious remove, the too-light touch aren’t core parts of his strategy, but simply patches on a sinking ship, admissions of failure.
Birthday’s ten short chapters aren’t simply internally rambling; they bear only the sparest connection to one another. The book contains a disquisition on the “Encyclopedia,” a Borgesian literary enterprise of Aira’s which serves as a warehouse for his aimless research; a chapter about the death of the French mathematician Évariste Galois; a playful hermeneutic probing of the Last Judgment; and an encounter with a young religious waitress in the Café del Avenida in Pringles who, when she fails to show up at the café again, elicits one of the book’s most poignant asides:
The lives of strangers have their own rules, which differ from case to case, and anyone who tries to deduce them from a chance meeting is bound to get lost in an ocean of conjectures. It’s strange to think that even the most predictable creature of habit, like myself, might, from a stranger’s point of view, appear and disappear in an apparently random fashion.
As with many of Aira’s novelettes, there’s something dry, almost aseptic about Birthday. In the chapter on Galois, a famed mathematician who, after challenging a man to a duel, composed his entire life’s work in a single night, Aira considers the impossibility of a novelist getting away with a similar trick, though he cedes it’s a mechanism he’s been pursuing all his life: “I was searching for a system that would allow me to write all my novels on the last night.” It’s a lovely line, tinged with romanticism and the moonlight of impossibility, but, surrounded as it is by the jangle of his jerky prose, it rings hollow.
Aira’s lack of a larger schema under which his atomism of speculations would fall into order ultimately makes Birthday an unsatisfying venture. In a strange rumination on whether the central point of a circle can be said to turn when the circumference turns, Aira asks his son’s opinion and is promptly scoffed at. Perhaps, his son explains, if the circle were real, with a physical point, then Aira’s question might have weight, but a “mathematical point” is something completely different. Aira finds this hairsplitting ridiculous: “Reality is complicated enough already; why burden it with pedantic fictions?” As a reader, you’re tempted to scribble in the margins of your copy of Birthday: “Look who’s talking.”
—Bailey Trela is a writer living in Bushwick.
QUOTE: : "César Aira's unconventional memoir is filled with timeless reflections on the struggle of learning to live well."
Birthday by César Aira
César Aira's unconventional memoir is filled with timeless reflections on the struggle of learning to live well
★★★★
Book Review by Emily Corpuz | 28 Feb 2019
Birthday by Cesar Aira
Birthday by Cesar Aira
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Book title: Birthday
Author: Birthday by César Aira, translated by Chris Andrews
César Aira holds no punches in his stark introspection. Birthday stems from a seemingly innocuous thought about the phases of the moon that occurs to Aira just after his fiftieth birthday. From this point, the book reads as an unconventional memoir as the seasoned author, whose work is incalculably influential in Latin America, reflects on events and mindsets that have resulted in his “incapacity to live”.
Aira explores how his mind becomes fixed fast in time while the rest of the world, and the rest of his own life, goes on without him. In answer to this singular experience of becoming unpredictably stuck and unstuck in time, he negotiates the leaps and gaps of his life that he both laments and holds dear. Leaping from one topic to another, especially between chapters, gives readers a sense of the mental and temporal leaps Aira experiences throughout his life.
Though originally written in 1999 when the author turned fifty, Birthday contains timeless reflections on the struggle of learning how to live well. If you are a writer or are interested in writing, this is an invaluable source of hard-won wisdom from someone who knows first-hand the trials and elation of storytelling; if you are not, Birthday remains a must for fresh insight into navigating this curious life.