I‘ve said it before, but I’m sure several people reading this won’t know: whenever I get a new New Directions catalog, I first skim it to see if they are publishing anything by César Aira. I love his books, but they are often very short. A welcome sight, then, whenever a new release contains two!

First we get Festival, first published in 2011. This is a fascinating novella that explores some of Aira’s favorite themes — nostalgia, time, and the creation of “new” art — all told within a zany story about a cinema festival (no, not quite as zany as The Literary Conference, but still).

The star of the festival is the Belgian postmodern sci-fi filmmaker named Alec Steryx. Not only is he going to preside over the Grand Jury and premier his latest film, but, given his long, revolutionary career, he is also the subject of a special retrospective at the festival. His schedule is absolutely packed. Strangely, though, he has brought along his mother, surprising his hosts.

She was an elderly lady, around ninety years old, who looked lost and disoriented as she emerged from customs with her son. She didn’t respond to greetings and words of welcome, bewildered as these were; nor to questions and comments, which attempted to be polite. Her lack of response could be explained by the inherent inconveniences of a long airplane trip, which affect the young and the old, the health and the infirm. It was likely, moreover, that the old woman had been heavily sedated in order to face the ordeal. Her son didn’t look in great shape either.

There are quite a few people at the festival who have their own perspective on Steryx and his art, some reverent and others who see nothing in his work yet nevertheless expend a great deal of time debating this point. And now these people have to start to wonder why Steryx’s mom is at a festival she seems to have no interest in whatsoever, indeed, a festival which seems to be causing her a great deal of discomfort and distress.

And how does this fit into the movies? We do learn a little bit about them, and it’s clear why some viewers would love them and others hate them. The movies, after a clear beginning, with the heroes set to save the world, something strange happens (something strange that I’ve experienced when reading Aira):

But — and here’s where it became weird — a few minutes into the movie they all appear to lose interest in what they were doing, their faces empty of all expression and intention, their lines lose syntax, their actions any purpose. Along with the characters, the actors abandon their respective roles — it’s as if they’ve forgotten the parts they are playing. The same thing happens with the lighting engineer, the sound engineer, the stage designer . . . and of course the director. Even so, the movie continues and comes to an end. The only ones who don’t lose interest are the spectators, watching in growing fascination as this disintegration takes place before their very eyes.

How does Steryx’s decision to bring his mom fit into this? Does it? Aira has us asking the same question as we read Festival.

The next novella, Game of the Worlds, which was first published in 1998, though the copyright page also has 2018 and, strangely, it has two of Aira’s completion dates (I love that he does this): January 24, 1998 and May 24, 2018. I don’t know what changes were made in 2018, but the book we get here is fantastic. I admit I was a bit worried going in. After all, it is placed second. Could that be due to quality? A silly thing to wonder about, for sure, and a silly question that was soon answered in the negative; I loved Game of the Worlds from the first paragraph. Here is how it begins:

At some time in the far distant future there was a very popular game — a total waste of time — that young people loved to play, much to the chagrin and occasional outrage of their parents.

This first sentence is actually not from an omniscient third-person narrator; no, this is said by one of the parents, who knows he is living in the distant future and not the present (a perplexing detail that comes up again) and who perhaps has less problems with the game than other parents prone to outrage:

I used to complain that — thanks to the time and attention they spent gaming — they abandoned me, leaving me alone in the house for whole days at a time at the mercy of the Intelligent Home System: it caused me no end of problems and they were supposed to be my shield. But I let them play; they knew that I was permissive because I understood — and more than understood: I appreciated — generational differences, which have always existed and always should exist, to guarantee at least some evolution and to spare the species from total stagnation, even if that evolution does not go in the direction we might prefer. Who are we to judge?

The game, though, is, to my present-day ears, morally reprehensible: “As for us, our civilization had come to consider the countless populations of countless worlds dispensable, and we’d placed them at the mercy of the entertainment industry.” Yes, the game is to destroy worlds, and it turns out they are real worlds, with real populations, that are really destroyed. Our narrator questions this without being fully against it, at least at first. His main issue will be, it turns out, that this game might reintroduce a concept that was eradicated in the distant future: God.

Both of these novellas are filled with Aira’s characteristically bizarre inquisitiveness and beautifully rendered sentences and paragraphs. They are both replete with ideas that are not fully explained, meaning these are rich for rereading.