The "flight forward" technique (pushing the story onward with any device available to the writer's imagination, hurdling over the pauses and revisions necessary to create logical, believable plot developments) seems more attractive to me as an idea than as demonstrated in this short novel. But ap...
Irony in the hands of Cesar Aira is a wonderful thing. It offers the sort of grace that shared, genuine laughter brings to a conversation about a dark subject.I think it's this trait- his kind use of irony- that makes Aira's wild experiments work so well. There are, of course, other admirable tra...
El argentino César Aira goza ya en España de un merecidísimo culto, que se acrecentará con Varamo, una sorprendente e hilarante historia de un escribiente de tercera panameño.
I was the sole keeper and mistress of the impossible.Reality is the playground of the writer with memories and the artifacts of their past as the swings and slides for their games. César Aira’s How I Became a Nun is a humorous jaunt through the life of a 6 year old boy—or girl—also named César Ai...
‘It was another proof of art’s indifference; his life might have been broken in two, but painting was still the “bridge of dreams”.’In order to achieve the depth of soul and vision necessary to become a true artist, Rainer Maria Rilke prescribes a life of solitude. However, this exchange of artis...
‘Just because there had not yet been any miracles, however, didn’t mean they couldn’t happen…’We live in a world dominated by the media. In a world where nearly anyone can have a camera primed and ready in their pockets, where everything we say or do can be unearthed by digging around the interne...
They climbed the stairs littered with rubble to the middle level of the edifice: like the other apartments, the one they had acquired occupied a whole floor, the fourth. Apart from the Pagaldays there were only six other owners, all of whom made an appearance on that last morning of the year to s...
Since direct and sincere requests were ineffective, I had to resort to fraud and trickery, always on a small scale, pretending, for example, to be paralyzed, blind, or afflicted with some terrible disease. It wasn’t something I enjoyed at all. One day it occurred to me that I could try a subtler,...