New Directions Pearl Series

New Directions launched its collection "New Directions Pearls" with works of César Aira, Federico García Lorca (In Search of Duende) and Javier Marias (Bad Nature, or With Elvis in Mexico).
Of the latter publishes the English translation of the short story "Mala índole" that first appeared in 1999 in Granta.

Interview with César Aira

Francisco Ángeles (La Nacion - Argentina) interviews César Aira.

-¿Has pensado alguna vez que es muy complicado seguirte? Debe de ser muy difícil que te encuentres con alguien que haya leído tu obra completa, ¿no?

-Hay algunos que han tomado esa actitud un poco de coleccionista. Yo he editado en muchísimas editoriales. En la Argentina han proliferado estos últimos años pequeñas editoriales independientes que son mi terreno de juegos, mi playground favorito. Prefiero publicar con estos pequeños editores que suelen ser gente joven; algunas editoriales son unipersonales. Hoy en día los medios técnicos permiten hacer un libro con cierta facilidad, y toda editorial nueva que aparece en Buenos Aires o alrededores se inaugura con un libro mío, porque yo siempre estoy disponible. Me encanta porque me da una gran libertad. En general, a estos jóvenes les gusta lo que hago, y si yo estornudara, publicarían un estornudo mío. Sé que puedo darles cualquier cosa, puedo "subir la apuesta", digamos.

-Tienes una imagen de escritor hermético, no sé si difícil. Dicen que no te gustan las entrevistas.

-En la Argentina no doy entrevistas. Por supuesto, cuando empecé a publicar daba entrevistas a todos los que me la pedían, pero llegó un momento en que hubo demasiadas, y me di cuenta de que me absorbía mucho. Era algo que competía con mi trabajo propiamente dicho. En nuestro pequeño mundo todos se conocen y si le doy una entrevista a uno, va a venir otro a decirme "¿Por qué a él sí y a mí no?"

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César Aira: Ghosts

Natasha Wimmer reviews César Aira's Ghosts

The Argentine novelist César Aira is the Duchamp of Latin American literature, a light-footed experimentalist who follows a credo of improvisation and constant forward motion, plotting as he goes and turning out at least two short novels a year. His agenda is subversive, but his brutal humor and off-kilter sense of beauty make his stories slip down like spiked cream puffs. The violent culinary imagery is apt: this is a writer who drowns characters in vats of strawberry ice cream (in the surreally autobiographical "How I Became a Nun"). As Roberto Bolaño, his contemporary, said, "Once you've read Aira, you want to keep reading Aira."

"Ghosts," the latest installment in Aira's project, is an exercise in queasiness, a heady, vertigo-inducing fantasia. Set on the roof of a half-finished luxury apartment building in Buenos Aires, it takes place over the course of a single day. On a New Year's Eve morning of "high childishness," the future owners of the apartments visit the construction site, wandering from room to room. Most of the walls are up, but there are no doors or windows or flooring, and the raw strangeness of naked concrete is the first warning that the reader has entered Aira's makeshift universe.

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Book Review: How I Became a Nun by César Aira

Tom Roberge reviews César Aira "How I Became a Nun"

Many novels succeed by virtue of their authors' abilities to take a single event or moment and parse it into individual elements: background information, subtle details, motivations, consequences. The reader, in this model, is taken from a point of relative confusion to a point of clarity. This is a time-tested formula, but there are writers capable of succeeding by following a model that runs contrary to this one.

César Aira's How I Became a Nun starts with a small but not insignificant event: the day the narrator's father delivers on a long-standing promise to treat her (or him — Aira changes the child's gender every few pages) to an ice-cream cone. But the child hates the taste so much that she ends up sobbing violently at the thought of another mouthful. To reveal what happens next would spoil the tragic story, but it changes the child's life.

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Argentine Literature

More Books of the Year

... or in this case translations of the year. From Words Without Borders selection:

From Esther Allen

An Episode in the Life of a Language Painter
by César Aira
Translated by Chris Andrews
New Directions

"The most extraordinary book in translation of 2006 was César Aira's An Episode in the Life of a Landscape Painter, brilliantly translated by Chris Andrews (and published by New Directions). Aira is a rather unusual writer who composes his short books (more than thirty of them so far) in uninterrupted bursts of inspiration and without looking back or correcting, or so I'm told. As you might expect, such a methodology leads to a highly varied and uneven though always fascinating body of work. In this brief, incandescent book, about an actual incident in the life of the German artist Johann Moritz Rugendas who traveled in Argentina in the early nineteenth century, lightning strikes."

From Francisco Goldman

Last Evenings on Earth
by Roberto Bolaño
Translated by Chris Andrews
New Directions

"Chris Andrews' translation captures Bolaño's unique and elusive voice perfectly."

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Latin American Literature

reading others words

bhupinder on César Aira's Life of a Landscape Painter - It has certainly been one of the more unexpectedly wonderful books I came across this year, elegant with a dense story that is most poignant when the bolt of lightening strikes Rugendas and transforms him even while deforming his face forever.

Miguel de Unamuno's The Tragic Sense of Life in The Fates Conspire Against Us - The Tragic Sense of Life is a book filled with the most visceral philosophy that I have ever read or even heard of. Miguel de Unamuno looks some of the toughest philosophers in the eyes and slaps them, and often the reader at the same time. He smiles at Hegel and says, oh, yes, “The great framer of definitions, who attempted to reconstruct the Universe with definitions, is like the artillery sergeant who said that a cannon was made by taking a hole and enclosing it in steel.”

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Latin American Literature

Cesar Aira / Eloy Urroz

A review of César Aira's An Episode in the Life of a Landscape Painter and Eloy Urroz's The Obstacles

After the Rabelaisian movement known as El Boom in Latin American letters there came along a period of exhaustion. And revolt, too. There was, for instance, a group of authors that included the Chilean Alberto Fuguet and the Bolivian Edmundo Paz Soldán who ascribed to the generation of McOndo. Their objective was to turn Magic Realism on its head. But their novels were flat and repetitive and, in most cases, D.O.A.

Then there were the five Mexicans responsible for the "Crack Manifesto." Their aesthetic was far more ambitious: to shape a novel in Spanish unburdened by language and geography. The results were interesting, among them Jorge Volpi's "In Search of Klingsor," about the Nazis and the making of the atomic bomb. Interesting, of course, is a demeaned word: It used to mean appealing but nowadays is a synonym of all right, maybe even tolerable.

Interesting is the last adjective I would use to describe the late Roberto Bolaño, by far the most inspiring talent from south of the border since the '70s. A Chilean who lived for years in Mexico and ultimately settled near Barcelona before he died in 2003 at age 50, Bolaño's oeuvre is slowly making its way into English, in renditions by Chris Andrews, released under the aegis of New Directions. (His collection of stories, "Last Evenings on Earth," has just appeared.) His hypnotizing style and restless approach to plot are at once refreshing and humbling.

More imaginative, although also less consistent, is the astonishingly prolific Argentine César Aira, whom Bolaño once described as the type of "eccentric" whose prose, "once you start reading [it], you don't want to stop." Bolaño's portrait isn't quite accurate: Born in 1949, Aira has published almost 60 books, from criticism on Edward Lear and Alejandra Pizarnik to editions of the poetry of Osvaldo Lamborghini to a vast number of novels. In the novels I've read, like the untranslated "El congreso de literatura," about a writer's conference where one of the participants decides to clone Carlos Fuentes, the premise is better than its execution. Aira's dreams are emblematic but never unconventional. When he's in top form -- and it's seldom the case -- he can be utterly astonishing, as in "An Episode in the Life of a Landscape Painter," published in Spanish in 2000 and now translated into English by Andrews, too.
(...)
On the opposite end of the spectrum is "The Obstacles," a laborious novel by Eloy Urroz, one of the members who agglutinated around the Crack Manifesto. Published originally as "Las Rémoras" in 1996 and translated into English by the superb Ezra Fitz, it is a trite, self-obsessed novel-within-a-novel typical of the French Nouveau Roman.

Urroz was born in 1967. He came of age in Mexico City and spent summers in La Paz, Baja California. Infatuated by and aspiring to Xerox, at least structurally, Mario Vargas Llosa's "The Green House" -- which, oddly, is, in his view, "the best Latin American novel of the 20th century" -- Urroz has a series of narrators, all of them male, interrupting the narrative, three of them on a quest for unrequited love. Women are sheer objects of desire. The perspective shifts back and forth from Mexico's capital to the town of Las Rémoras. Unfortunately, he belongs to the school of fiction that believes in the reader's journey as a form of punishment. Suffer and ye shall be redeemed from the wretchedness of pop lit!

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