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 Aira as s/he learns the magic of blending fact and fantasy to better understand the undercurrent of magic pulsing through plain reality. Through a lonely pilgrimage of childhood, César experiments with fiction in a preparation towards a life of being an author, a sacred undertaking of servitude to Stories much like entering the Sisterhood of Nuns.‘Fiction and reality were fused at this point; my simulation was becoming real, tinting all my lies with truth.’As in Elizabeth Hardwick’s exquisite Sleepless Nights, Aira blends biography (though very limited) with fiction to create a lush tale where the lines between reality and fantasy are not only blurred but become irrelevant. The narrator of this story is César Aira, but not necessarily the César Aira writing the story, who is also not necessarily the same César Aira when he is not writing the story. They share the same hometown of Coronel Pringles, Argentina and enough subtle similarities to trick the reader into stepping dangerously toward an Intentional fallacy of assuming the author and narrator are one and the same, but this is all for sport and elevates the playfulness of his often meta-driven novels. César the narrator often identifies as a girl (though once as a boy in the opening chapter), despite all the outsider characters referring to César as a boy. This opens up an intrigue of gender identification, and it could be inferred that César experienced an emasculation of sorts after the tragedy of the opening scene with his father. However, such an interpretation seems too concrete for a book with such playful transparency. It does not matter which gender the narrator is, and the novel works equally well if César is a son or daughter; in the art of fiction an author must be able to identify as many characters, male or female, and must do so convincingly for the story to be accepted into the soul of the reader. César Aira presents both as a reminder that the author’s own gender identification must be pushed aside to fully immerse into the realm of the character.‘The transformation could go either way, reality becoming delirium or dream, but the real dream turned dreamlike in turn, becoming the angel, or reality.’César the narrator experiments with blending fact and fiction throughout the novel, preparing for a life as an author. An important lesson is learned early on when sitting on a ledge above a prison in which his father is interned. All the prisoners were my dad, and I loved him...now I knew that love was more, much more than that. I had to become the guardian angel of all the desperate men to discover what love really was.The author must watch their characters from an on-high vantage point, and truly love them all in order to understand them and make them work. Later, César spends hours in the bedroom imagining teaching a lesson to a classroom of student, students based on his/her own classmates. Students are imagined with learning difficulties, such as dyslexia. However, ‘I hadn’t invented disorders so much as systems of difficulty. They weren’t destined to be cured but developed.’ It is an act of creation, developing problems not to solve them but to bring them to fruition as a believable aspect of the fictitious classroom. Like a good author, César learns to create individuals that also must serve as a universal idea: ‘they were nobody and they were everyone.’ And through creating and teaching, César also learns and watches ideas form as if on their own power. Like an author, César guides a story while simultaneously being guided by it.How I Became a Nun is a wonderful little novel in which no Nuns are present. Instead, the nunhood is a vague metaphor for the calling of an author, in which they must devote their lives to the name of art. Like the ‘voice of the radio within the radio’, in which the fictitious voice of God delivers a moral message at the end of a religious radio program, the author must become the radio while also hearing ‘the radio within the radio’ that is the natural growth of the story being transmitted through them. This is a fantastically humorous and brief book that manages to breathlessly juggle a wide-reaching allegory, many aspects of which I have left untouched here. Literature is one of the closest things to magic we have in our world, the sort of magic that dazzles the heart and imagination of a young child, and Aira is a masterful purveyor into this magical world. 3.5/5My vision couldn’t be satisfied with what was visible, it had to go rushing on, beyond, into the abyss…
This book was originally written in Spanish, and translated to English. Actually, the English was very good, I wouldn't have known this was the case except that it was mentioned on the back cover.But I do wonder if it leads to one of my biggest confusions of this book. Is this a boy, or a girl? In real life, César is male. This is obvious from his website and of course the Wikipedia article. His father calls him an awful boy, a horrible son when César does not like the ice cream his father bought for him. His teacher calls him "that Aira boy". But he constantly refers to _HIMSELF_ as a little girl, or his mother's daughter. Also, I would say that the image on the cover of the book is a female (check the Amazon link, see if you agree) holding a strawberry ice cream cone. And since a strawberry ice cream cone led to all of César's troubles in this book... I'd guess it is supposed to represent him. It's very interesting.I can't tell if it's because of the translation, or if it was intentional due to the delirium and other strange effects of César's poisoning and illness. Maybe at that time he believed himself to be female.But otherwise, the story was absolutely fascinating! I love reading stories from people's childhoods anyway, so perhaps I am biased - but César's childood was so strange, completely uprooted ... and all because his father bought him an ice cream cone as a treat. The ending left me wanting to read more - if it weren't autobiographical, you'd believe him to be dead at the end. I'm absolutely curious how he escaped it!I'd definitely suggest this to anyone who enjoys slice of life books, especially messed up ones. Also people interested in psychology at all, some of the effects of the poisoning led to some very interesting thoughts and beliefs. And it's very short. You can easily read this in one sitting.
What do You think about How I Became A Nun (2007)?
Membaca buku ini memberi pengalaman merasai perspektif seorang kanak-kanak yang jauh berbeza berbanding pengalaman membaca "The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time" yang aku sendiri akui punya kesukaran untuk mengadaptasi sifat kebudakan kepada citarasa dewasa. "How I Became A Nun ini, aku termasuk pembaca lain turut tercari-cari di mana susuk nun-nya, tapi aku percaya pasti ada sebab dan signifikasinya. Barangkali César Aira hanya mengambil sifat nun itu sendiri tanpa perlu mematerialisasikan kepada susuk tubuh. Misalnya sepertimana seorang nun yang dipasung oleh hukum agama secara tidak langsung terasing dari kebiasaan memberi pantulan mirip kepada keterasingan kanak-kanak penghidap dyslexia ini. Keterasingan ini membawa pembaca kepada perspektif secara solo seorang kanak-kanak yang telah dipulaukan. Membawa pembaca melalui bersiri-siri lamunan bersifat intelektual dalam cubaan kanak-kanak ini menafikan dia seorang penghidap dyslexia malahan jauh lebih bijak berbanding kanak-kanak lain yang gemar bermain dengan boneka dan punya teman imaginasi. Aku juga turut mengalami kecelaruan dalam mengenalpasti gender kanak-kanak dalam buku ini. Asalnya aku beranggapan ia hanya ralat dalam percetakan. Mulanya dia digambarkan sebagai lelaki, selepas itu perempuan dan kemudiannya lelaki bernama César Aira. Adakah ia hanya satu perlambangan tranformasi kepada seorang nun atau none? Bermulanya di Rosario, percubaan seorang bapa mahu anaknya merasa ais krim buat kali pertama menjadi asas kepada buku ini kerana di tempat lama mereka Coronel Pringles tidak wujud ais krim. Naratif buku ini bermula dengan ais krim berperisa strawberi dan juga berakhir dengan ais krim berperisa strawberi. Bermula dengan keracunan cyanide dan berakhir sebagai mangsa penculikan secara tidak langsung kanak-kanak ini dilihat menjadi mangsa keadaan kepada setiap isu hangat yang sedang melanda Argentina ketika itu. Aku tidak pasti adakah buku ini perihal kisah malang seorang kanak-kanak semata-mata, tetapi yang pastinya kelak kamu tidak akan melihat ais krim berperisa strawberi dengan cara yang sama lagi.
—Jerry Ghazali
I didn't connect with the writing style, it's very particular and somehow only glides around the surface, even when talking about insanity and psychological moments which are great topics for thoughtful, meaningful writing.It's not intelligent enough to be worth it but also not funny enough to be worth it.Still, there were some cutesy/fun/silly phrases:"Por algo dicen: lo barato sale caro."''Yo iba bien predispuesta. Adoraba a mi papá. Veneraba todo lo que viniera de él.'' (I think I remember something like that, although it's been years, and for a while I forgot.)''La comedia asomaba a la realidad. Peor: la comedia se hacía realidad, frente a mí, a través de mi. Sentí vértigo, pero no podía echarme atrás."''Eso me inmovilizaba definitivamente."''Me miraba con el mismo disgusto profundo, visceral, con que yo consideraba mi helado de frutilla.'''Y nadie sabe mejor que uno mismo cómo ser delicado y comprensivo con su propria persona.'about the book: "No hay escritura sin libertad"
—Elizabeth Pyjov
A generous three stars for this intentionally confounded, maybe too readable story about the confusions of early youth. It starts promisingly, with a vivid, clear, clever, simple scene, but soon after devolves into Celinesque delirium (lots of ellipses, I mean), and thereafter rarely accelerates. Representative thematic (not stylistic) sentence is probably: "It was a transformation of reality . . . The transformation could go either way, reality becoming delirium or dream, but the real dream turned dreamlike in turn, becoming the angel, or reality." At best, the varyingly male or female narrator's story makes sense in terms of the forward-flowing, rationally irrational spirit of childhood, but I probably would've abandoned this if it were much longer than 117 pages. Typos on page 100 ("though" instead of "thought") and page 111 ("that" instead of "than") suggest that even the copyeditor/proofreader wasn't so engaged. Awarded an extra star because sometimes the sensibility and talent of the same writer who wrote Episodes in the Life of a Landscape Painter seemed to seep through . . . An OK little book, a forgettable entertainment with a bit of an edge, like a one-peso cone of strawberry-cyanide ice cream.
—Lee
