César Aira

[Stewart]

C?sar Aira is a name that I've been hearing a bit about recently, largely because of the forthcoming English translation of his 1990 novel Las Fantasmas as Ghosts (from New Directions). They've already put out two more of his novels (An Episode In The Life Of A Landscape Painter and How I Became A Nun) and plan to publish more in the future.

A quick snippet of bio information from Wikipedia:

C?sar 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.​

Has anyone had the pleasure of reading him yet?

 

[promtbr]

Re: C?sar Aira

Just read Ghosts...
Provisional Literature should be a category, start it with Borges and right after, insert this novel...
After the first third of this novella, I was getting a tired of the narrative pov 'tag' game. It finally settled on a protagonist and my curiosity was engaged at the accounts of the ghost's peni (the plural of penis on my planet). The architecture motif to examine ways in which art (this text) relates to time and space IS also the figurative apartment complex. Since the characters reside in this building during its construction, Aira and his ghosts can play in this transitory stage and explore the thresholds there, the trope of "built/unbuilt"...

The irony is multi-layered, and ANY comments on it would be a spoiler...

10 pages from the end I had my doubts, having been underwhelmed recently by a novel I was supposed to rave about, Invention of Morel, which, after Borges, it was just too pretty of a trick and too predictable for me...Tho Ghosts covers similar territory, and as a lot of this type of literature (I have read) it suffers from characters who could be simply indistinguishable microphones of the same narrative voice.


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[e joseph]

Re: C?sar Aira

Crap. This one's right at the very top of the toberead pile. I'll get back to you in about a week, unless it gets bumped - which almost always happens to books at the top of my pile.

 

[Daniel del Real]

Re: C?sar Aira

10 pages from the end I had my doubts, having been underwhelmed recently by a novel I was supposed to rave about, Invention of Morel, which, after Borges, it was just too pretty of a trick and too predictable for me...Tho Ghosts covers similar territory, and as a lot of this type of literature (I have read) it suffers from characters who could be simply indistinguishable microphones of the same narrative voice.


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Reading this as a negative comment probably this is good to me, since I loved The Invention of Morel.
I'm aware that nobody can be really near to Borges but I like similar works that try to express the possibilities he deals with. I wouldn't expect Bioy Casares, Sabato or Aira to be nearly better than Borges.
I really have to give Aira a try, haven't read anything from him

 

[promtbr]

Re: C?sar Aira

Reading this as a negative comment probably this is good to me, since I loved The Invention of Morel.
I'm aware that nobody can be really near to Borges but I like similar works that try to express the possibilities he deals with. I wouldn't expect Bioy Casares, Sabato or Aira to be nearly better than Borges.
I really have to give Aira a try, haven't read anything from him

I really should not be so hard on Casares, and have only read Invention of Morel. I promise to give Asleep in the Sun and A Plan For Escape a try....

Aira's themes in Ghosts do deal prominently in "provisional" realities, art, time space etc, but his approach is different than Borges (tho I am not THAT well read in him it was long ago). Where I understand fully why Borges stuck to short fiction and parables, Aira's novella is a logical approach as if Borges would have attemped something longer. I am winging it here and probably way off base...I commend Aira and Casares for finding structures that would support longer explorations of those themes, in my limited reading of them, it would seem finding such structures would be really problematic..

 

[nnyhav]

Re: C?sar Aira

Read Ghosts this past week myself. Not up to the standard of Episode in the Life, more comparable to How I Became a Nun, but I have the feeling that as more Aira becomes available they'll all fit into a larger scheme.

 

[Daniel del Real]

Re: C?sar Aira

Nothing to do with Borges or Bioy Casares. Altough it deals with fantastic episodes, it's way below the quality of The Invention of Morel, not even say something about Borges.
As prombtr said, the start is very slow, with irrelevant situations for the novel. When Aira starts talking about arquitecture and constructions he has a few good thoughts about art and the process of making it real and then making it art. At some moments, talking about the architecture used by many tribes and culture he lost me. His characters are weak and predictable and the intervention of the ghosts, even if creative in the way they are presented or described, didn't convinced me at all.
When I was 15, 10 pages from the end, I thought the finale must be strong, imponent to save the novel from mediocrity, but it didn't.
Quite disappointed about this one. **000

 

[promtbr]

Re: C?sar Aira

I am surprised about your overall judgement, but I am not surprised that you found the characters 'weak'. As per all this figurative, provisional type of fiction, one can't take the writer to task for something he never set out to present.
(Again in my lowly opionon!)
I find all of Borges, and what I have read of Casares type of fiction exploring 'ideas' more than human relationships, that the characters are 'flat'. If I approached them with traditional character-plot expectations I should be wasting my time reading them...For me, Morel was predicitable. I felt Aira pulled off the supreme multi-layered ironies in The Ghosts. If one 'gets' the explorations of thresholds (becoming vs negation), of the myriad natures of time in fiction, art held up against "real" time...The precise use of architecture constructs (endless rooms stretching out to infinity to compartmentalize our existence for example) were for me funny and interesting. As was the almost kisch irony about Patria needing to find a "real man" etc..the incidents with the ghosts all come together.

I had to laugh when I read the Complete Review's reviewer called it a "coming of age novel"... right, and Gravities Rainbow is about missiles...

I will read Episodes in the Life of a Landscape Painter and compare.

Oh well, we can agree to disagree. Its "all good" as my kid says and it would be boring if we all felt equally about the same books. I see you gave Gatsby 3 stars where for me, its a 5.



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[Daniel del Real]

Re: C?sar Aira

I find all of Borges, and what I have read of Casares type of fiction exploring 'ideas' more than human dynamics, characters are 'flat'. If I approached them with traditional expectations I should be wasting my time reading them

You're right here, maybe I didn't express myself correctly. Borges and Casares do not try to build a very strong character, maybe because of the length of their works. They tend to be "flat" but it doesn't mean they are not well constructed. It's like the characters from plays, they are set to play their part, fulfill a position, represent an idea. Maybe we don't know much about their life, past, psychological traces, but they play their role perfectly to make the ouvre complete. This is the way I see characters with Borges and Casares. With Aira, it's different. Leaving Patri aside, the rest of characters are not necessary in the development of the story. That's what I meant about didn't liking those role players.

Oh well, we can agree to disagree. Its "all good" as my kid says and it would be boring if we all felt equally about the same books. I see you gave Gatsby 3 stars where for me, its a 5.

You're so right, even when we disagree we all complement the ideas of each other and give us different point of views. So thanks a lot for the review which created the interest for reading Aira.

 

[e joseph]

Re: C?sar Aira

Just finished the novel so I thought I'd jump in before the thread continued to cool. With that said, I have very little to add. I leave it feeling a little underwhelmed, though I enjoyed the reading. And while I haven't yet read any other novels by Aira, I would guess that nnyhav's thought that Ghosts is part of a larger whole is spot-on.

I'll leave it with a question: does Aira use an editor?

 

[Daniel del Real]

Re: C?sar Aira

I'll leave it with a question: does Aira use an editor?

What exactly do you mean? Don't get it hehe

 

[e joseph]

Re: C?sar Aira

Something about Aira's digressions and changes of direction in the novel seemed a bit haphazard to me. Not in a stream-of-conscious kind of way either. More like Aira wrote a passage, then it was time for lunch and when he came back he just started writing a brand new passage. Segways seemed to be left out. Anyone else or just me? And this is not a complaint; it made the novel feel more off the cuff and fun. I hope this clears up my statement (and my own lack of editing) from earlier Daniel. If not, lemme know and we'll try again.

 

[promtbr]

Re: C?sar Aira

obviously it [Ghosts] works for 1 of us, and 3 of us are exactly wrong ...

I grant if I were to approach it as a traditional novel and wish it to adhere to more accepted plot/character/structure concept, I would not give it a '5'... and agree that the wandering character POV tag in the first 30 pages was puzzling. Not backing off my assesment tho...
More Aira perspectives:

How I Became a Nun and Episodes...

Ghosts

Three Percent's take on Ghosts
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[e joseph]

Re: C?sar Aira

I'm still sticking with "I enjoyed the novel." My being underwhelmed (a poor word choice in retrospect) has more to do with wanting to fit Ghosts into a larger framework; it feels more like a piece of a puzzle than a standalone work - at least it does to me.

As for my suggestion that Aira's work appeared unedited, that's not to be read as a negative. It felt like I was reading him search for the story, which I kind of liked. I would also guess that the wandering character POV you mentioned was just that, Aira searching for his story, before finding that Patri was the one with the tale to tell. All just guesswork on my part though.

And you're telling me that Gravities Rainbow ISN'T about missiles? I'll be damned...

 

[nnyhav]

Re: C?sar Aira

I think there's more going on within Ghosts (elsewhere I've characterized as An Episode in the Afterlife of an Architectural Site, suggesting that maybe some vital aspect leaves the building once it's completed, perhaps also the story structure) than has been credited so far: for example, the changing POV isn't haphazard, but works its way from class (and subclasses; workcrew, Chileans) to family to individual, the ghosts becoming more prominent at each refocusing. In a sense, the narrative is left open so the reader can finish it.

 

[Eric]

Re: C?sar Aira

I enjoy strange coincidences. So I thought I'd revive this thread, whose existence I now know of thanks to Mirabell.

I went to Uppsala public library this afternoon to see if they had any book by C?sar Aira in Swedish. They didn't, but had one in Spanish. My Spanish isn't good, but just to see what sort of book it was, I went to the shelves and found Un episodio en la vida del pintor viajero. Even my Spanish is good enough to know that the title means "An Episode in the Life of the Itinerant Painter".

I started reading as best I could, and found the following on the second and third pages, about the protagonist:

Su bisabuelo, Georg Philip Rugendas (1555-1742) fue el iniciador de la dinast?a de pintores. Lo hizo por haber perdido en su juventud la mano derecha; la mutilaci?n lo incapacit? para el oficio de relojero, que era la tradicional de su familia y para el que se hab?a preparado desde la infancia. Debi? aprender a usar la mano izquierda, y manejar con ella l?piz y pincel. Se especializ? en la representaci??n de batallas, y tuvo un formidable ?xito derivado de precisi?n sobrenaturel de su dibujo, derivada ?sta de su formaci?n de relojero y del uso de la mano izquierda, que al no ser la que habr?a empleado maturalmente lo obligaba a una met?dica deliberaci?n.

The coincidence lies in this: I have just finished translating a historical novel about a precision lens-polisher and inventor of astronomical telescopes, who, as a teenager, lost his right hand but was dogged enough to continue with the manual job of lens polishing - with his left hand. And this lens-polisher existed in real life: Bernard Schmidt (1879-1935).

So of all the books in the library, this was the only one by C?sar Aira, yet happened to mention a situation similar to the one that I have been dealing with for several months when translating.

*

The C?sar Aira book looks to be in the tradition of Peter Adolphsen and maybe Max Sebald. In other words, a lot of realia, and some pictures. It looks quite interesting.

 

[Daniel del Real]

Re: C?sar Aira

I enjoy strange coincidences. So I thought I'd revive this thread, whose existence I now know of thanks to Mirabell.

I went to Uppsala public library this afternoon to see if they had any book by C?sar Aira in Swedish. They didn't, but had one in Spanish. My Spanish isn't good, but just to see what sort of book it was, I went to the shelves and found Un episodio en la vida del pintor viajero. Even my Spanish is good enough to know that the title means "An Episode in the Life of the Itinerant Painter".

I started reading as best I could, and found the following on the second and third pages, about the protagonist:

The coincidence lies in this: I have just finished translating a historical novel about a precision lens-polisher and inventor of astronomical telescopes, who, as a teenager, lost his right hand but was dogged enough to continue with the manual job of lens polishing - with his left hand. And this lens-polisher existed in real life: Bernard Schmidt (1879-1935).

So of all the books in the library, this was the only one by C?sar Aira, yet happened to mention a situation similar to the one that I have been dealing with for several months when translating.

*

The C?sar Aira book looks to be in the tradition of Peter Adolphsen and maybe Max Sebald. In other words, a lot of realia, and some pictures. It looks quite interesting.

An interesting coindidence in fact Eric. I had never heard of this Aira book before; he's got so many that is difficult to identify them all. As many other of his books it sounds really appealing, however I always have unfinished experiences regarding Aira's book and a feeling he never develops as expected.

 

[Stiffelio]

Re: C?sar Aira

I enjoy strange coincidences. So I thought I'd revive this thread, whose existence I now know of thanks to Mirabell.

I went to Uppsala public library this afternoon to see if they had any book by C?sar Aira in Swedish. They didn't, but had one in Spanish. My Spanish isn't good, but just to see what sort of book it was, I went to the shelves and found Un episodio en la vida del pintor viajero. Even my Spanish is good enough to know that the title means "An Episode in the Life of the Itinerant Painter".

I started reading as best I could, and found the following on the second and third pages, about the protagonist:

The coincidence lies in this: I have just finished translating a historical novel about a precision lens-polisher and inventor of astronomical telescopes, who, as a teenager, lost his right hand but was dogged enough to continue with the manual job of lens polishing - with his left hand. And this lens-polisher existed in real life: Bernard Schmidt (1879-1935).

So of all the books in the library, this was the only one by C?sar Aira, yet happened to mention a situation similar to the one that I have been dealing with for several months when translating.

*

The C?sar Aira book looks to be in the tradition of Peter Adolphsen and maybe Max Sebald. In other words, a lot of realia, and some pictures. It looks quite interesting.

Ironically, this book is impossible to find in Argentina. It was published directly in Spain but never distributed to the rest of Latin America.

You are right, Eric, there are some similarities with Peter Adolphsen's fiction, especially in the way his stories follow unpredictable courses. In fact, when Adolphsen was in Buenos Aires to present Br?mstein/Machine he did mention that he greatly admired Aira (and of course Borges, who in turn has definitely influenced Aira). But Aira the author intrudes a bit more in his stories than Adolphsen. Another writer you could find similarities with is Mexican Mario Bellatin.

 

[Daniel del Real]

Re: C?sar Aira

Finished An Episode In The Life Of A Landscape Painter and without being mesmerizing, it is by far, the best I've from him. I still think his prose is something that takes time to settle down in his narrative, not very straightforward and with a different pace; it's the structure of sentences that sometimes looks awkward at the beginning, but then you get used to it. He manages to get a lot of great descriptions of la pampa, especially in the main scene where he describes the situation that changes the travesty originally scheduled by Rugendas. Imagery reminded me a lot of Cormac McCarthy's depiction of landscapes in Blood Meridian.
Good nouvelle, but just not exactly running to the bookstore to get my next Aira.

 

[tiganeasca]

Re: C?sar Aira

I am hoping that in the four years since Daniel posted, we've got some new thoughts on Aira. I've decided that the time has come for me to dip in a toe or two and can't choose among his works. What should I start with? Does it matter? Or should I just move on to someone else?