Cesar Aira

Now that New Directions put out a number of his books in English, I'd be interested what people think about his output. I started out with ´Ghosts' which is not the absurdistic meta-literature of ´Varamo' or ´The Literary Conference'.

Episode in the Life of a Landscape Painter is my favorite but it's uncharacteristic. The most improvisational one, that showcases the benefits and limitations of his "flight forward" aka no editing method is Shantytown.

I finished Shantytown today. It was a fun read but I understand what you mean. Episode in the Life of a Landscape Painter is definately a great read. My favorite is ´The Literary Conference´.

“This was one of those situations in which the whole is not enough. Perhaps because there were other "wholes," or because the "whole" made up by the speaker and his personal world rotates like a planet, and the combined effect of rotation and orbital movement is to keep certain sides of certain planets permanently hidden.”

aira is really good at spinning out passages like that one, passages you want to go back and read again and again. most of them are buried in very sloppy books -- even the ones published in English, which are his most complete i assume, have a very loose quality to them, and are incredibly inconsistent in terms of quality. the form of the individual novella seems like a very strange unit to contain aira's genius. it seems wasteful. but i think this is the idea with him. the author as a producer, churning out products, like a factory. the materiality of the book, the individual book, seems important to him. more important than the quality of the writing contained in books. the second half of shantytown was one of the shittiest things i've ever read, but the first half was dreamy and incredible and even profound, as a half-ironic exploration of the way wealth legitimizes poverty by romanticizing it. i guess he didn't know what to do with this, but instead of aborting the project, he just published it... but not before tacking on this ending, rendering it "finished" in a formal sense. it's a very strange working method.

They are inconsistent, yes, but that´s no wonder with such a high productivity. Like Calvino he uses fiction as a way of materializing an idea but sometimes the story gets in the way, which indeed happens with Shantytown. ´How I became a nun' has the same problem, especially with the ending. But I like his 'anything goes' approach so you never know what to expect. I´m curious to read a book on short stories (which is scheduled for next year), maybe this fits his style better than novelas.

i don't know if his fiction is meant to materialize ideas, or at least i don't think his intention in this regard is as self-conscious as calvino. everything, i think, is subordinated to the story, but "stories" to aira are digressive and impulsive -- the best ones register the strange whims and turns of the storyteller's imagination. he talks often of the "forward momentum" of a narrative, how they are inherently temporalized, sequential, rooted in the logic of causality. i think the implicit distinction here is between narrative and poetry, which attempts to arrest time, or at least ususally seems less satisfied with the ordinary rhythms of lived time.

my point is that i think the inconsistency, for aira, is a deliberate feature of his working process. the books are artifacts of the movements of his imagination over a certain duration of time. i think this is why he writes the full date of the end of composition at the end of each of his books rather than just the year or whatever. the fact that these open-ended, imaginative wanderings are preserved in actual, physical books -- with covers designed by art departments and things -- seems ironic and interesting to me, and i think this tension is important for aira. books are bounded, complete, they almost seem to want to arrest the ongoing-ness of time that is aira's major subject.

i always think of derrida's phrase "the end of the book and the beginning of writing" when i think of aira.

Aria is like the definition of a minor writer

I'm glad new directions is putting his stuff out in English tho, he's Def worth taking a look at

Just finished ´Conversations´, very meta-literary as always with Aira. Definately one of the better books of his that I´ve read, due to wrapping things up nicely in the end.

Just finished Ema the Captive and am pretty much baffled tbh, I've enjoyed several of his books but I can't get a handle on this one at all.

Isn't what ppl are describing above just...pulp writing?

Basically what he is, yes. An interesting, deeply flawed pulp writer.