Preface
Ghosts
An Episode in the Life of a Landscape Painter
The Literary Conference
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‘He is an improviser, his work a performance on the page. But experimental, improvisational, performative and dreamlike as Aira’s many marvellous books are, they also reveal him to be no less of a traditionalist, responding to the most ancient custom of storytelling as a way of passing the hours of the night’ Judges’ citation, The Man Booker International Prize 2015
‘Aira has written over seventy books. They are mostly novels, mostly slim and mostly astoundingly good. He reminds me of Philip K. Dick, of Honoré de Balzac, of Machado de Assis and of Søren Kierkegaard … all of which is simply to say that he is without compare’ Rivka Galchen, New Yorker
‘César Aira is writing a gigantic, headlong, acrobatic fresco of modern life entirely made up of novelettes, novellas, novellitos … In other words, he is a great literary trickster, and also one of the most charming’ Adam Thirlwell
‘Aira’s stories seem like shards from an ever-expanding interconnecting universe. He populates the racing void with multitudinous visions, like Indian paintings of gods vomiting gods. He executes digression with muscular lucidity’ Patti Smith, The New York Times
‘César Aira’s body of work is a perfect machine for invention – he writes without necessity or any apparent forebears, always as if for the first time’ Maria Moreno, BOMB
‘If there’s currently a writer who defies all classification that writer is César Aira. Once you’ve read Aira, you don’t want to stop. Aira is an eccentric, but he’s also one of the three or four best Spanish-language writers alive today’ Roberto Bolaño
‘Aira’s works are like slim cabinets of wonder, full of unlikely juxtapositions. His unpredictability is masterful’ Harper’s
‘Aira’s novels display a consistent engagement with the importance of storytelling and the act of writing. The engrossing power of his work comes from how he carries out these feats: with the inexhaustible energy and pleasure of a child chasing after imaginary enemies in the park’ Los Angeles Review of Books
‘To love the novels of César Aira you must have a taste for the absurd, a tolerance for the obscurely philosophical and a willingness to laugh out loud against your better judgment’ NPR Books
‘Aira’s charm is subtle, unobtrusive, it doesn’t try to seduce with cheap likeability. He takes a leisurely stroll through his scenes. It’s as if Machado de Assis got redrafted by Bolaño and edited by Anatole France’ Bookslut
‘César Aira’s novels are the narrative equivalent of the Exquisite Corpse, that Surrealist parlour game in which players add to drawings or stories without knowledge of previous or subsequent additions. Wildly heterogeneous elements are thrown together, and the final result never fails to surprise and amuse’ The Millions
‘In spite of the apparent randomness of his ideas and the pacing of his breaks, surprises and cuts in time, he inspires a sort of willingness in the reader to be taken aback; any reader – untrusting or submissive – might enjoy them as if they had pressed “shuffle” on their favourite pop band’s discography’ Ox and Pigeon
‘What’s really unique about Aira’s output, considering the speed with which he “flies forward” (seemingly by the seat of his pants), isn’t that he produces so much work, or that it’s fanciful and odd, but that what he’s produced forms a coherent body of work – and one that’s consistently enjoyable to read’ The Argentina Independent
‘A manifestly gifted writer’ The Quarterly Conversation
‘Astonishing – turns Don Quixote into Picasso’ Harper’s
If there is one contemporary writer who defies classification, it is César Aira, an Argentinean from a town in the province of Buenos Aires called Coronel Pringles, which must, I suppose, be a real place, although it could well have been imagined by its most eminent son, who has given us superlatively lucid portraits of the Mother (a verbal mystery) and the Father (a geometrical certitude), and whose position in contemporary Hispanic literature is equal in complexity to that of Macedonio Fernández at the beginning of the twentieth century.
Let me start by saying that Aira has written one of the five best stories I can remember. The story, included in Juan Forn’s anthology Buenos Aires, is entitled “Cecil Taylor.” He is also the author of four memorable novels: How I Became a Nun, in which he recounts his childhood; Ema, The Captive, in which he recounts the opulence of the pampas Indians; The Literature Conference, in which he recounts an attempt to clone Carlos Fuentes; and The Crying, in which he recounts a sort of epiphany or bout of insomnia.
Naturally those are not the only novels he has written. I am told that Aira writes two books a year, at least, some of which are published by a little Argentinean company named Beatriz Viterbo, after the character in Borges’s story “The Aleph.” The books of his that I have been able to find were published by Mondadori and Tusquets Argentina. It’s frustrating, because once you’ve started reading Aira, you don’t want to stop. His novels seem to put the theories of Gombrowicz into practice, except, and the difference is fundamental, that Gombrowicz was the abbot of a luxurious imaginary monastery, while Aira is a nun or novice among the Discalced Carmelites of the Word. Sometimes he is reminiscent of Roussel (Roussel on his knees in a bath red with blood), but the only living writer to whom he can be compared is Barcelona’s Enrique Vila-Matas.
Aira is an eccentric, but he is also one of the three or four best writers working in Spanish today.