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I love it when we get something by César Aira newly translated into English. There simply is no way to predict what it is going to be about (often even when you’re three-quarters of the way through the book), but you’re guaranteed a strange ride through beautifully strangeness. My first venture with Aira was with a landscape painter through Argentina in the 19th century. I’ve been with him in a the skeleton of a haunted condominium that is being constructed, on a trek to clone Carlos Fuentes, to a sunlit ice cream parlor where the strawberry ice cream contains arsenic, on a windy trip to Patagonia. In Varamo (2002; tr. from the Spanish by Chris Andrews), Aira takes us to Colón, Panama, in 1923, where we go through a rather eventful night with a lowly government clerk named Varamo.
Review copy courtesy of New Directions.
I think it’s worth relating an anecdote here. I began reading this book one night just before going to sleep. I was very tired and soon I was reading the same sentence over and over though my mind seemed to keep the story going forward. Eventually I woke myself up enough to put the book down. The next morning I couldn’t help but chuckle about where my mind had drifted the night before: some taxidermist executing his plan to pose a fish playing a piano, only quite a ways into the project realizing that fish anatomy doesn’t suit playing a piano. What a bizarre dream, I thought. Of course, the development felt just like a dream; here I had some strange idea that went on for a while before I realized that anatomical flaw and finally moved on. But at breakfast the next morning, a thought: this is Aira. I might not have been dreaming.
You already know, of course, that I wasn’t dreaming. Such is the joy (a part of the joy, that is) of the work of Aira.
So what is this book?
It begins at the end of a workday when Varamo stops to pick up his salary from the government.
In the interval between that moment and the dawn of the following day, ten or twelve hours later, he completed the composition of a long poem, from the initial decision to write it up to the final period, after which there were no further additions or corrections.
The poem, The Song of the Virgin Child, is declared a masterpiece of modern Central American poetry. It’s the only thing fifty-year-old Varamo had ever written, and he never wrote again. There was just something about that night after picking up his paycheck: “The action contained the inspiration, and vice versa, each nourishing and consuming the other, so that nothing was left over.”
The book Varamo is, from one perspective, a venture through that night seeking what created the poem. Though, playfully, the way we find out what happened is by deducing, “in the most rigorous sense of that word,” from the poem. Aira is playing here, once again, with the creative act in the writing process.
Picking up his salary ushers in a frenzied night of creativity. There is a reason, and it’s one of the fun parts of the book. When Varamo picks up his money, he immediately realizes that it is counterfeit. He cannot, therefore, go out and use the money. On the other hand, he cannot charge the government with giving him counterfeit money. It’s not long after this that we enter a new episode (the one I thought I was dreaming) when we see Varamo engaged in his taxidermy. And the night goes on.
As with his other works (particularly How I Became a Nun and The Seamstress and the Wind), the story plays out in a series of episodes, and the thread holding them together is sometimes rather flimsy, even if that doesn’t matter. It also doesn’t matter that we get seemingly important (or completely insignificant) facts rather late in the book. For example, we get this at about the half-way point, causing us to rethink our mental image of Varamo:
His mother was Chinese; he was Chinese; therefore he had to be her son; there could be no doubt about it. The conclusion was irresistible in Panama, for overwhelming demographic reasons.
Varamo is a strange book, and I do think it better for readers new to Aira to start with An Episode in the Life of a Landscape Painter or Ghosts (two that I think have a lot more substance to them than the rest, which are brilliant mediations on form and style, with excellent episodes, but which, for me, are not as fulfilling). One has to just let Aira go and trust that in the end it will be quite an experience, even if it’s hard to make sense of.
I also think it pays to know a bit about Aira’s creative process, which is a frequent theme in his books. For example, I think some may be disappointed that Varamo’s poem itself is hardly discussed in the book, though it is the whole reason we care about Varamo’s life at all (Aira is always brings something up and then drops it). We don’t read a line of The Song of the Virgin Child. Because we never really discuss the poem itself, it feels like a mere plot device, which can be frustrating. That said, the poem also the device that allows Aira to discuss some of his ideas about the creative act in the writing process, and, in particular, how to achieve “immediacy,” which, as Varamo is told, “is the key to good style.” (Immediacy is one thing Aira always achieves in his books.) Varamo is a great look at the mixture of form and substance and the life that creates each.
Click here to read the abstract of the story on The New Yorker webpage (this week’s story is available only for subscribers). César Aira’s “The Musical Brain” (tr. from the Spanish by Chris Andrews) was originally published in the December 5, 2011 issue of The New Yorker.
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This is fantastic! I never believed that Aira, one of my favorite authors, would have a short story published in The New Yorker — and certainly The New Yorker is that much better for it. Hopefully it will bring him many more readers from the United States.
I’m very interested in what people think of this story. For me, it very much resembled some of his longer works: it begins in one place, setting up our expectations, and then proceeds to take strange detour after strange detour, finally concluding in a single bizarre episode that is completely unexpected, despite any clues we might have. Indeed, I felt ”The Musical Brain” matches and sometimes exceeds the crazed meanderings in some of Aira’s books. Because of this, it’s a fairly good introduction to Aira’s stranger works, like the hilarious The Literary Conference (my review here) and (the to me slightly less enjoyable) The Seamstress in the Wind (my review here). For those who are perhaps attracted to Aira’s prose but don’t find the strangeness appealing, I still heartily recommend reading Ghosts (my review here) or An Episode in the Life of a Landscape Painter (my review here); while strange, these two are not quite as strange and are a bit more serious. As a sneak peak, the next title New Directions is publishing is Varamo, which I’ll review closer to its publication date early next year; to me Varamo was a bit of a balance between the bizarre and the serious.
“The Musical Brain” — where to begin? As in some of his other books, the narrator here is Aira himself as he looks back on a strange sequnce of events from his youth in Coronel Pringles, Argentina, in the 1950s (no, this similarity in no way makes this story predictable). Early on, we understand that Aira has a faulty memory. He looks back and remembers a time when his parents broke routine by taking him and his little sister to a dining event. They never ate out, for reasons Aira explains, but on this one particular night – and he’ll come up with a few possible reasons for breaking routine – he finds his memory taking him to an evening out, everyone dressed up. In a corner of the room he remembers seeing the librarian, and his high school headmistress, Sarita Subercaseaux rumaging through a bunch of boxes of books. Ah, he thinks, probably his family went out to this particular special dinner to help establish the public library. However, as reasonable as this sounds, apparently this cannot be exactly true:
During my last visit to Pringles, hoping to confirm my memories I asked my mother if Sarita Subercaseaux was still alive. She burst out laughing.
“She died years and years ago!” Mom said. “She died before you were born. She was already old when I was a girl.”
“That’s impossible!” I exclaimed. “I remember her very clearly. In the library, at school . . .”
“Yes, she worked at the library and the high school, but before I was married. You must be getting mixed up, remembering things I told you.”
That’s strange, yes, but not the kind of strangeness I referred to above. Because, at this point, we leave the issue that would seem to take center stage in a piece about the mystery of childhood and memories (I quite like these kinds of books; see William Maxwell’s So Long, See You Tomorrow, Michael Ondaatje’s The Cat’s Table, and Julian Barnes’s The Sense of an Ending (my reviews here, here, and here, respectively)). Instead of following on this line directly, the family gets up from the dinner, and Aira takes us to a room by the theater where the mysterious Musical Brain is on display (I’ll let you find out what this is when you read it, though you’re probably imagining it correctly). And, before we get settled, the family is driving somewhere else; Aira took his seat in the back of the vehicle, his favorite place to sit, and while explaining why he so much liked the back seat also briefly describes his literary technique:
There was also a more arcane reason that I liked to travel in the back: since I couldn’t hear what they were saying in front, it meant I didn’t know where we were going, and so the itinerary would take on an unpredictable air of adventure.
Of course, this is exactly what we readers are feeling by this point: Where on earth is he taking us. Hopefully, we are enjoying the ride and are not too concerned with the ultimate destination. There is another reason for these detours, though, both for the family and for Aira the writer:
[I]nstead of going a few hundred yards in a straight line we’d often end up driving five miles, following a tortuous, labyrinthine route. For my mother, who had never left Pringles, it was a way of expanding the town from within.
“The Musical Brain” expands the town from within beautifullly. It’s not that this is a small town portrait (because surely this stuff did not happen in Coronel Pringles or anywhere else), it’s that in a such a short space Aira reproduces the expansiveness of life as it is lived, complete with false starts, lingering questions, inconsistencies, and expanded by the intrusion of something completely unexpected (like a love triangle among dwarves threatening the town — maybe fear of a dwarf with a gun is why they were at that unexplained public dinner), something that makes no sense (well, you’ll get this in the story).
There’s a great Book Bench interview with translator Chris Andrews, who translated this story and several other books by Aira (click here). Here is a good take-away line:
But as anyone who has read [Aira] knows, the “correctness” is only syntactic: his sentences are well formed, as the linguists say, but his stories and his books are, well . . . deformed, swerving wildly, jumping from one kind of fiction to another, as in “The Musical Brain”.
I do recommend reading and rereading this story. Also, if you’re interested, a few years ago I interviewed Chris Andrews for this blog (click here), and it’s still one of my favorite posts.
Each time a New Directions catalog comes in the mail, the first thing I look for is a new title by César Aira, so much have I loved what I’ve read by him. Thankfully, it seems New Directions is not slowing down their Aira releases, and we can now read the bizare The Seamstress and the Wind (La costura y el viento, 1994; tr. from the Spanish by Rosalie Knecht, 2011). Now, naked ghosts roaming a construction site, lightning striking a painter, the Macuto Line giving way to treasure, and cloned silk worms invading a city notwithstanding, I’d still say that How I Became a Nun (my review here) was the strangest Aira I’d read — until now. So it was nice to learn that when The Seamstress and the Wind was first published in Spanish, it appeared in the same volume as How I Became a Nun, whose opening pages of a childhood scene turned nightmare (we’ll get some of this in The Seamstress and the Wind, too) I still read with glee.
Review copy courtesy of New Directions.
Why do I love reading Aira? Well, his books are incredibly immediate. We get the sense (and we’re right on the money) that Aira is writing these events on the fly, as if he’s watching the events occur as he dramatically narrates them to us. There’s so much energy behind his scenes. I’ve mentioned it here before, but it’s worth remembering Aira’s writing process. He sits down in a cafe in the morning and writes whatever comes to mind, even allowing the events in the cafe to invade the story (like a fly, or a drunk man). In this way, his story is not only a story but also a record of its own production. He’ writes himself into puzzles and then writes himself out of them the next day, refusing to make things easy on himself by allowing extensive revision. Not just anyone can pull this off, by which I mean that few writers following this method could come up with something anyone would want to read, but somehow Aira does it, creating something not simply entertaining and certainly not simply interesting because of the method of its production; besides this, he comes up with something meaningful and thoughtful, often something haunting.
On to The Seamstress and the Wind. I just mentioned how Aira writes in a cafe and includes whatever is going on in the writing; well, here we open the book to find Aira in a cafe in Paris, writing about what he’s thinking about as he writes in a cafe in Paris. It’s the new book:
These last weeks, since before coming to Paris, I’ve been looking for a plot for the novel I want to write: a novel of successive adventures, full of anomalies and inventions. Until now nothing occurred to me, except the title, which I’ve had for years and which I cling to with blank obstinacy: “The Seamstress and the Wind.”
It’s a little tricksy, sure, but writing about whatever he’s doing also serves to introduce one the issues he plays with in this book: memory; or, rather, forgetting, losing, maybe never having. We find out that the title he clings to is the result of a dream he had. It was a brilliant dream, a vivid story, a marvel he couldn’t wait to write down, and it had something to do with a seamstress and the wind.
However, when I woke up I had forgotten it. I only remembered that I had had it, and it was good, and now I didn’t have it. In those cases it’s not worth the trouble to wrack your brain, I know from experience, because nothing comes back, maybe because there is nothing, there never was anything, except the perfectly gratuitous sensation that there had been something . . .
So the story itself is gone, if it ever was there. Aira knows it’s pointless to try to remember, but he resists letting it go “and in that resistance it occurs to me that there’s something else I could rescue from the ruins of forgetting, and that is forgetting itself.” Aira goes on to explain how this “taking control of forgetting” is “consistent with my theory of literature.” He expresses a perhaps hypocritical disdain for writers who rely on memory and says, “Forgetting is richer, freer, more powerful.”
Which leads Aira to a childhood memory that has its moment of loss and forgetting. He is playing with his friend Omar near a truck’s trailer. Aira is startled to find his friend has disappeared. He’s shocked. Omar was there and now he is not. Aira wanders home and finds out that it is much later than he thinks. Everyone is, in fact, worried about him – he had disappeared, and now he cannot remember the afternoon. He has no idea what happened to that time (even now), but the fact that so much time has passed causes him even more anxiety. After all, he has arrived, and Omar is still missing: “It wasn’t me, they were wrong . . . it was Omar who’d disappeared! It was his mother who had to be told, a search for him that had to be undertaken. And now, I though in a spasm of desperation, it would be much more difficult because night was falling. I felt responsible for the lost time, whose irretrievable quality I understood for the first time.”
Omar’s mother is Delia Siffoni, the local seamstress. She’s working on a wedding dress for the pregnant school teacher when she hears Omar is missing. She freaks out, takes her sewing kit and the wedding dress, jumps in a car and tells it to go! She’s certain that her son is in that trailer and on his way to the abyss — Patagonia. “What else could she do?”
Now, this is where the story gets whacked, and I mean that as a technical term. Coming home to find his wife missing since she’s fled to find their missing son, Ramón Siffoni takes off too. And then someone else takes off after them, and it’s a mad race to Patagonia. There’s a wreck, flight, a monster child, and the wind eventually falls in love. To be frank, it was a bit magical and, for me, incoherent. That’s not to say it isn’t fun, but I admit that it left me a bit baffled at times, and not in a good way. It’s says a lot for the book, then, that I came away still feeling I’d been through something powerful.
There’s a moment with Delia: ”Then this is Patagonia? she said to herself, perplexed. And if this is Patagonia, then what am I?” Indeed. Who is she? What is any of this? I don’t know if there is a symbolic meaning to the monster child or the wind or any other of the strange things we encounter in this book. But there’s the forgetting, the loss, and the chase, and Aira doesn’t leave those alone, and they become a powerful look at his own childhood experiences and, perhaps, into the Argentina of his childhood. What was threatening? What was forgotten? What was lost, that perhaps never was? I will close with a passage I loved from early in the book that I think shows that, despite the whimsy, Aira is talking here about something more serious. The passage shows peace, a near surety of peace, yet a peace threatened by something, perhaps only something imagined but that, imagined, is becoming real:
How could we get lost in a town where everyone knew each other, and almost everyone was more or less related? A child could only be lost in labyrinths and they didn’t exist among us. Even so, it did exist if only as a fear, the accident existed: an invisible force dragged the accident toward reality, and kept dragging at it even there, giving it the most capricious forms, reordering over and over its details and circumstances, creating it, annihilating it, with all the unmatched power of fiction.
When I first read Aira, I became an immediate fan. I have loved the three books New Directions has offered us: Ghosts, which was quietly disturbing and atmospheric; An Episode in the Life of a Landscape Painter, which was full of nature and adventure and how to capture that in art; and How I Became a Nun, which is a bizare — bizare — take on childhood memories (ohh! that strawberry ice cream!). I recommend any of them. I couldn’t wait to read the most recent offering, but, due to some postal service mishaps over the past months, it took me a lot longer to get to The Literary Conference (El congreso de literatura, 2006; tr. from the Spanish by Katherine Silver, 2010). It was well worth the wait! Not at all what I expected (I should know better than to try to predict anything about an Aira book), and showing just how versatile Aira is, this is the funniest book I’ve read all year. No offense meant to Bertie and Jeeves.
Review copy courtesy of New Directions.
The Literary Conference borders on . . . no, devles into the ridiculous — in the best way possible. A superlative stylist (and being translated by the superlative Katherine Silver), Aira’s matter-of-fact tone somehow manages to stay in tact in a book that begins as a puzzle-adventure in Venezuela, turns into a mad-scientist take-over-the-world science-fiction, and ends as a B-movie — and still manages to be about the creation of art.
Allow me to elaborate:
In the first section, “The Macuto Line,” a relatively well known translator and author (named César) is making his way to a literary conference but has made a stop in Venezuela. Near his hotel is the famous Macuto Line, a rope that wraps around a rock and plunges into the ocean. This line, it is said, is a centuries old puzzle that, if solved, leads the way to buried treasure. The line was obviously made by a genius; it is itself a piece of art. No one, in all the years (and, thankfully, the line is still in tact despite the ocean and wind), has solved this great mystery.
On stormy nights the wind made it sing, and those who heard it during a hurricane became obsessed for the rest of their lives with its cosmic howls. Sea breezes of all kinds had strummed this lyre with a single cord: memory’s handmaiden.
César arrives, takes a look at it, and solves it. He admits, “My own intelligence is quite minimal, a fact I have ascertained at great cost to myself. It has been just barely adequate to keep me afloat in the tempestuous waters of life.” Nevertheless, his individual experiences, the events and moods that build up him as an individual, suited him for this task. It’s an excellent, slightly insane, discourse on the complexity of the individual.
Immediately wealthy, he could now skip the literary conference and go anywhere in the world, waking up the next morning to immense luxury. But that is not part of his plan, so, on to the literary conference. On the way, our narrator tells us a story about a mad scientist who has it in his mind to take over the world. He then proceeds to “translate” this story for us: the mad scientist is, of course, himself — César, our narrator, a slightly respected author, newly wealthy, is, it turns out, a bit handy with the science of cloning. For some time he has been hatching a diabolical plan, the central feature of which is to figure out whom he could clone who would best help him take over the world. This discourse is hilarious, and César finally lands on the perfect candidate: Carlos Fuentes. Naturally. And since Fuentes is going to be at this literary conference, César’s new fame and wealth do not deter him.
What does all of this mean? Does it mean anything? Is Aira simply telling us a fun story? Perhaps, and if so, it is still worth the short time it takes to read it. Still, this is Aira, and this book is, among other things, self-conciously concerned with its own inception and with its own process:
And (in conclusion) I have filled these plots with contents that have between them a relationship of only approximate equivalencies, not meanings.
Telling the reader that there is no such thing as “in the meantime,” César sets up his cloning station on a mountain (not for the atmospheric effect, as it might appear, but because the air is more conducive to the process) and, because it takes some time to create an army of Carlos Fuentes clones, he goes down to the town in the valley to wait “in the meantime.” In the chapters that come before the clone army descends upon the town, we go to parts of the literary conference, watch the staging of one of César’s plays he does not remember, and we have a funeral for a tiny insect. Events proceed to escalate, until César seems to realize that it’s all just a bit ridiculous, but –
Since turning back is off limits: Forward! To the bitter end! Running, flying, gliding, using up all the possibilities, the conquest of tranquility through the din of the battlefield. The vehicle is language. What else? Because the valve is language.
Where does this lead us? Well, César himself will tell us:
It seems like the insertion of a different plot line, from an old B-rated science fiction movie.
And, remember that I mentioned at the top that through all of this Aira maintains a matter-of-fact (though energized!) tone, delivering to us this ridiculous plot from the eyes (and mouth) of someone slightly above it all, but who is, I’m sure, having a blast. I don’t know what it all means – how the discourse on the individual relates to the cloned army, how the funeral connects to the plot, or, frankly, how the Macuto Line fits into the plot — but it is fun and interesting because such a frenzied writer is taking us there, and because this frenzied writer is showing us a bit of his mentality as he does so:
Which reminds me of the answer to the questions I left hanging: how to measure the velocity of my thoughts. I am trying a method of my own invention: I shoot a perfectly empty thought through all the others, and because it has no content of its own, it reveals the furtive outlines — which are stable in the empty ones — of the contents of the others. The retrograde cloned mini-man, the Speedometer, is my companion on solitary walks and the only one who knows all my secrets.
I was talking to Barbara Eppler, president of New Directions, a few weeks ago, and she mentioned how she went to Argentina where, lucky her, Aira took her on a tour of some of the museums. Fittingly, they saw many museums in just a couple of hours. I must feel slightly similar after having read this book.
I’m rocketing through César Aira’s books available in English (others reviewed here and here). Which is not hard since they are incredibly short, and there are only three readily available (The Hare, published in the U.S. in 1997 is cheapest used on Amazon at a mere $363, so I don’t count it). It also helps that their plots are wild, taking turns at corners the reader can’t see coming. How I Became a Nun (Cómo me hice monja, 1989; tr. from the Spanish by Chris Andrews, 2007) is no exception. In fact, of the three I’ve read, it is the wildest yet.
Review copy courtesy of New Directions.
How I Became a Nun is different from the other two in that it starts with the sense of immediacy the others built up to. The opening thirty pages are intense and worth reading in and of themselves. In them we meet our narrator, a young boy (or girl, if you rely on her account) named César Aira, who has just moved from a small interior town to a larger town. To his father’s delight, ice cream is available in the larger time, and, remembering his own excellent experiences with ice cream, the father is taking the young son for his first taste. Shockingly, touching his first spoonful to his mouth, César hates it, can’t even manage to swallow it so awful is the taste. The unbelieving father becomes indignant and finally outraged. How can anyone not like strawberry ice cream? This incident becomes somehow very important to the narrator’s development:
My story, the story of “how I became a nun,” began very early in my life: I had just turned six. The beginning is marked by a vivid memory, which I can reconstruct down to the last detail. Before, there is nothing, and after, everything is an extension of the same vivid memory, continuous and unbroken, including the intervals of sleep, up to the point where I took the veil.
Once this excellently rendered episode is over, the narrator takes us into a chilling fever dream, complete with doppelgänger parents, wherein the narrator is able to step out of the story for a moment in order to see from the outside her story moving onward (all of the ellipses in the following quote are Aira’s own):
Over all these stories hovered another, more conventional in a way, but more fantastic too. Separate from the series, it functioned like a “background,” always there. It was a kind of static story . . . a chilling episode, with a wealth of horrific details . . . It filled me with dread, making the four-part delirium seem like light entertainment by comparison . . . Except that it wasn’t just one more element, a bolt of lightning in a stormy sky . . . it was everything that was happening to me . . . everything that would happen to me in an eternity that had not yet begun and would never end . . . I was the girl in an illustrated book of fairy tales; I had become a myth . . . I was seeing it from inside . . .
This section is so different in form from the first section that I began to wonder just what kind of story I was entering. Then the next section came along, and it was very different from the first two. Again, that is part of the creative process that is on display in the form of the novella. And again, Aira ties this process into the substance of the themes underlying the strange narrative: creation of a personal narrative, identity, mimicry, parental figures’ role in all of the above.
The drama was triggered for me by the realization that the mute scene I was witnessing, the teacher’s and pupil’s abstract mimicry, affected me vitally. It was my story, not someone else’s. The drama had begun as soon as I had set foot in the school, and it was unfolding before me, entire and timeless. I was and was not involved in it; I was present, but not a participant, or participating only by my refusal, like a gap in the performance, but that gap was me.
Like the other two novellas, this one is packed with pleasure and intellect. My only problem was that each section is so separate and distinct from the one preceding it that it felt episodic and, therefore, lacked of the powerful forward thrust in the other two. But . . . as annoyed as I was that every ten pages or so I was thrown out of the narrative and dropped into a strange new place, once I settled down and thought about the form (form is so important to Aira, which I find ironic since his works seem so formless and ad hoc), things started to make sense. These gaps in the narrative are fundamental to the strangeness of Aira’s themes. That they are not discussed (or even, apparently, recognized) by the narrator is just as strange as the fact that he never seems cognizant of the little gender discrepancy so often apparent to the reader but never remarked upon in any way by any of the characters.
Aira gives me the impression that for him writing is a discovery process, and he doesn’t mind making the reader come along the way. As polished as his novels are, they come off feeling like the spiritual cousin to an old fashioned essay—the intial “trying” brings about a complete result where both author and reader are fulfilled.
If you were paying attention when I wrote about Aira’s Ghosts a little while ago, you noticed that New Directions offered to send me the two other Aira books they have published. There was no hesitation and very little effort to tone down my excitement when I gratefully accepted. Ghostsgave a taste of something I haven’t seen in many other places. Aira’s unique writing process results in such a strange and unique book, one never knows what one is going to get. Indeed, this is how it feels while reading. Because Aira writes in steps, the book evolves in our hands, turning suddenly. It is astounding that with this style, Aira still produces a solid, cohesive text, one with a unity most authors would cut off their arm for.
Review copy courtesy of New Directions.
An Episode in the Life of a Landscape Painter (Un episodio en la vida del pintor Viajero, 2000; tr. from the Spanish by Chris Andrews, 2006) is completely different than Ghosts, yet the freshness, the thrust forward into the unknown remains. I read about it on John Self’s blog, and he teased everyone with this: “What the book is saying is the book.” I think John is exactly right, but after reading it, I see that Aira actually goes a step further.
Here we read a fictional account of an episode in the life of Johann Mortiz Rugendas, a German landscape artist. He is encouraged by the ideas of Alexander von Humboldt:
Alexander von Humboldt (1769–1859) was an all-embracing scholar, perhaps the last of his kind: his aim was to apprehend the world in its totality; and the way to do this, he believed, in conformity with a long tradition, was through vision.
Under this philosophy, Rugendas takes a trip to the Americas to record the life of Latin America. Aira gives Rugendas a particular desire to record Argentina:
Although the Mexican phase is the best represented, and tropical jungles and mountain scenes constitute his most characteristic subject matter, the secret aim of this long voyage, which consumed his youth, was Argentina: the mysterious emptiness to be found on the endless plains at a point equidistant from the horizons. Only there, he thought, would he be able to discover the other side of his art … This dangerous illusion pursued him throughout his life. Twice he crossed the threshold: in 1837, he came over the Andes from Chile, and in 1847, he approached from the east, via the Rio de la Plata. The second expedition was the more productive, but did not take him beyond the environs of Buenos Aires; on his first journey, however, he ventured towards the dreamed-of center and in fact reached it momentarily, although, as we shall see, the price he had to pay was exorbitant.
Rugendas gets to Argentina through Chile and proceeds to journey across the country, hoping to get to Buenos Aires, recording through sketches the life he sees, hoping for a bit of action and always afraid he’s going to miss some vital moment.
His other cherished dream was to witness an Indian raid. In that area, they were veritable human typhoons, but, by their nature, refractory to calendars and oracles. It was impossible to predict them: there might be one in an hour’s time or none until next year (and it was only January). Rugendas would have paid to paint one. Every morning of that month, he woke up secretly hoping the great day had come. As in the case of the earthquake, it would have been in poor taste to mention this desire.
Hopefully in the pulled quotes above, one can see Aira’s ability with language. Even when I was unsure where this was going, I was thoroughly enjoying the voyage. It is vast yet immediate, full of frenetic energy yet poised and controlled. Collecting the translated books by Aira is a worthy endeavor. Hopefully the incredibly talented Chris Andrews will continue to produce them for us.
César Aira seems to be in the air lately. Over the past few years three of his books have been translated into English by Chris Andrews and published by New Directions: An Episode in the Life of a Landscape Painter (tr. 2006), How I Became a Nun (tr. 2007), and Ghosts (Los Fantasmas, 1990; tr. from the Spanish by Chris Andrews, 2009). I had never heard of Aira until Ghosts came out in February and a host of literary sites and publications reviewed him. However, it wasn’t until John Self posted his review of An Episode in the Life of a Landscape Painter that I remembered his name well enough to look for him.
Aira, an Argentinian, has been publishing two to four novella length books for years, so Chris Andrews and New Directions could be busy for some time. Knowing how prolific Aira was caused me to approach his work with skepticism. How can someone put out so many books and maintain high quality?
I can’t comment on any other works (yet) but at least in Ghosts I can see that his imagination and intelligence are for real. And I’m not sure, but I think his speed at writing is a strength, lending this novel a swift looseness and experimental quality I haven’t seen much before. In a way, it shows that Aira respects his reader. He’s having an intellectual conversation, and he trusts his readers to come along and see where it takes us. Indeed, his writing process is one of almost experimental freewriting. He has said he sits down at a cafe and writes a page. When he is done, he leaves. Apparently, the next day, rather than editing what he has written, he forges ahead, finding some way to move the story out of any corners he’s backed himself into. That said, this novel looks as polished as anything else out there, and the themes carry from the first page to the last in a march forward that makes it seem planned from the get-go.
This short book (139 pages) takes place in one day, December 31, on the construction site of a luxury condominium. In the morning the new tenants visit to see how construction is going; the condo was supposed to be finished that day. We are then fortunate enough to read a nice run down of the rest of the day, as the family who has lived on top of the condominium during its construction (the husband is in charge of security) prepares for the New Year’s Eve party. In its own way, the book resembles Mrs. Dalloway, moving steadily through the day, moving in and out of the head of one of the characters.
At the beginning of the book, we don’t know what character is going to be central because Aira introduces several candidates. As we move around in these minds, every once in a while Aira throws in a description of the ghosts who live on the site, seen only by some of the individuals. These descriptions are placed in the text as if the presence of the ghosts are ordinary:
So Raúl Viñas was keeping fourteen bottles of red wine cool, with a system he had invented, or rather discovered, himself. It consisted of resolutely approaching a ghost and inserting a bottle into his thorax, where it remained, supernaturally balanced. When he went back for it, say two hours later, it was cold. There were two things he hadn’t noticed, however. The first was that, during the cooling process, the wine came out of bottles and flowed like lymph all through the bodies of the ghosts. The second was that this distillation transmuted ordinary cheap wine, fermented in cement vats, into an exquisite, matured cabernet sauvignon, which not even captains of industry could afford to drink every day.
Soon the book’s narration settles on Patri, the fifteen-year-old daughter of the squatters. She is the character who confronts the ghosts the most, and she is the mind in which Aira explores most of the book’s themes. The ghost, in a way, can represent a sort of liminal space, occupying the boundary between life and death. However, here the liminal space is the boundary between what is real and unreal, or, as Aira puts it once, what is built and unbuilt.
But there is always a difference between dreams and reality, which becomes clearer as the superficial contrast diminishes. The difference in this case was reflected in the architecture, which is, in itself, a reciprocal mirroring of what has already been built and what will be built eventually. The all-important bridge between the two reflections was provided by a third term: the unbuilt.
In a great segment, during the siesta, Patri’s mind chases the space between architecture and literature, some related concepts between the Pygmies and Australian Aborigines. It’s a great intellectual game. But the game is not all this book has. Patri’s interest in the ghosts worries her mother.
The only thing that bothered her was the bad influence the ghosts might have on her children, particularly on her frivolous elder daughter. Since Patri was given to building castles in the air, certain chimerical spectacles could lead her to the the utterly misguided belief that reality is everywhere.
And Patri’s mother should be worried. Aira keeps us interested in the intellectual puzzles and Patri’s wellbeing all the way to the end, when the fireworks mark the new year.
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