{"id":6884,"date":"2012-02-05T23:33:16","date_gmt":"2012-02-06T03:33:16","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/?p=6884"},"modified":"2016-07-11T17:56:25","modified_gmt":"2016-07-11T21:56:25","slug":"cesar-aira-varamo","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/2012\/02\/05\/cesar-aira-varamo\/","title":{"rendered":"C\u00e9sar Aira: Varamo<\/em>"},"content":{"rendered":"
Varamo<\/em><\/strong><\/span>\r\nby C\u00e9sar Aira (2002)<\/span>\r\ntranslated from the Spanish by\u00a0Chris Andrews (2012)<\/span>\r\nNew Directions (2012)\u00a0<\/span>\r\n89 pp<\/span><\/pre>\n
I love it when we get something\u00a0by C\u00e9sar\u00a0Aira\u00a0newly translated into English.\u00a0 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\u00a0was with a landscape painter through Argentina in the 19th century.\u00a0I’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<\/em>, Aira\u00a0takes us to Col\u00f3n, Panama, in 1923, where we go through a rather eventful night with a lowly government clerk named Varamo.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
I think it’s worth relating an anecdote here.\u00a0I began reading this book one night just before going to sleep.\u00a0I was very tired and soon I was reading the same sentence over and over though my mind seemed to keep the story going forward.\u00a0Eventually 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.\u00a0What a bizarre\u00a0dream, I thought.\u00a0Of 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\u00a0flaw and finally moved on. But at breakfast the next morning, a thought:\u00a0this is Aira. I might not have been dreaming.<\/p>\n
You already know, of course, that I wasn’t dreaming.\u00a0Such is the\u00a0joy (a part of the joy, that is) of the work of Aira.<\/p>\n
So what is this book?<\/p>\n
It begins at the end of a workday when Varamo stops to pick up his salary from the government.<\/p>\n
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.\u00a0<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n
The poem, The Song of the Virgin Child<\/em>, is declared a masterpiece of modern Central American poetry.\u00a0It’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.”<\/p>\n
The book Varamo<\/em>\u00a0is, from one perspective, a venture through that night seeking what created the poem.\u00a0Though, playfully, the way we find out what happened is by deducing, “in the most rigorous sense of that word,” from the poem.\u00a0Aira is playing here, once again, with the creative act in the writing process.<\/p>\n
Picking up\u00a0his salary\u00a0ushers in a frenzied night of creativity. There is a reason, and it’s one of the fun parts of the book. When Varamo\u00a0picks up his money, he immediately realizes that it is counterfeit.\u00a0He cannot, therefore, go out and use the money.\u00a0On the other hand, he cannot charge the government with giving him counterfeit money.\u00a0It’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.\u00a0And the night goes on.<\/p>\n
As with his other works (particularly How I Became\u00a0a Nun<\/em> and The Seamstress and the Wind<\/em>), 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.\u00a0It also doesn’t matter that we get seemingly important (or completely\u00a0insignificant) facts rather late in the book.\u00a0For example, we get this at about the half-way point, causing us to rethink our mental image of Varamo:<\/p>\n
His mother was Chinese; he was Chinese; therefore he had to be her son;\u00a0there could be no doubt about it. The conclusion was irresistible in Panama, for overwhelming demographic reasons.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Varamo<\/em>\u00a0is 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<\/em> or Ghosts<\/em>\u00a0(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.<\/p>\n
I also think it pays to know a bit about Aira’s\u00a0creative process, which is a frequent theme in his books.\u00a0For example, I think\u00a0some may be disappointed that Varamo’s\u00a0poem itself is hardly discussed\u00a0in the book, though it is the whole reason we care about Varamo’s\u00a0life at all\u00a0(Aira is always brings something up and then drops it).\u00a0We don’t read a line of\u00a0The Song of the Virgin Child<\/em>.\u00a0Because we never really discuss the poem itself, it feels like a mere plot device, which can be frustrating. That said,\u00a0the poem\u00a0also the device that allows Aira\u00a0to discuss some of his ideas about the creative act in the writing process, and, in particular, how to achieve “immediacy,” which, as Varamo\u00a0is told, “is the key to good style.”\u00a0(Immediacy is one thing Aira always achieves in his books.)\u00a0Varamo<\/em> is\u00a0a great look at the mixture of form and substance and the life that creates each.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Trevor reviews C\u00e9sar Aira’s Varamo<\/em>, translated from the Spanish by Chris Andrews. Read the full post<\/u><\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":6885,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"libsyn-item-id":0,"libsyn-show-id":0,"libsyn-post-error":"","libsyn-post-error_post-type":"","libsyn-post-error_post-permissions":"","libsyn-post-error_api":"","playlist-podcast-url":"","libsyn-episode-thumbnail":"","libsyn-episode-widescreen_image":"","libsyn-episode-blog_image":"","libsyn-episode-background_image":"","libsyn-post-episode-category-selection":"","libsyn-post-episode-player_use_thumbnail":"","libsyn-post-episode-player_use_theme":"","libsyn-post-episode-player_height":"","libsyn-post-episode-player_width":"","libsyn-post-episode-player_placement":"","libsyn-post-episode-player_use_download_link":"","libsyn-post-episode-player_use_download_link_text":"","libsyn-post-episode-player_custom_color":"","libsyn-post-episode-itunes-explicit":"","libsyn-post-episode":"","libsyn-post-episode-update-id3":"","libsyn-post-episode-release-date":"","libsyn-post-episode-simple-download":"","libsyn-release-date":"","libsyn-post-update-release-date":"","libsyn-is_draft":"","libsyn-new-media-media":"","libsyn-post-episode-subtitle":"","libsyn-new-media-image":"","libsyn-post-episode-keywords":"","libsyn-post-itunes":"","libsyn-post-episode-itunes-episode-number":"","libsyn-post-episode-itunes-season-number":"","libsyn-post-episode-itunes-episode-type":"","libsyn-post-episode-itunes-episode-title":"","libsyn-post-episode-itunes-episode-author":"","libsyn-destination-releases":"","libsyn-post-episode-advanced-destination-form-data":"","libsyn-post-episode-advanced-destination-form-data-enabled":"","libsyn-post-episode-advanced-destination-form-data-input-enabled":false,"libsyn-post-episode-premium_state":"","libsyn-episode-shortcode":"","libsyn-episode-embedurl":"","_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[800,99,118],"tags":[579],"coauthors":[505],"class_list":["post-6884","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-book-reviews","category-cesar-aira","category-chris-andrews","tag-spanish"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/01\/Varamo.jpg?fit=371%2C530&ssl=1","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pqqvZ-1N2","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":false,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6884","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6884"}],"version-history":[{"count":17,"href":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6884\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":19278,"href":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6884\/revisions\/19278"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/6885"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6884"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6884"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6884"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=6884"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}