An Episode in the Life of a Landscape Painter

Preface. The Incredible César Aira by Roberto Bolano

If there is one contemporary writer who defies classification, it is César Aira, an Argentinean from a town in the province of Buenos Aires called Coronel Pringles, which must, I suppose, be a real place, although it could well have been imagined by its most eminent son, who has given us superlatively lucid portraits of the Mother (a verbal mystery) and the Father (a geometrical certitude), and whose position in contemporary Hispanic literature is equal in complexity to that of Macedonio Fernandez at the beginning of the twentieth century.

Let me start by saying that Aira has written one of the five best stories I can remember. The story, included in Juan Forns anthology Buenos Aires, is entitled "Cecil Taylor." He is also the author of four memorable novels: How I Became a Nun, in which he recounts his childhood; Ema, The Captive, in which he recounts the opulence of the pampas Indians; The Literature Conference, in which he recounts an attempt to clone Carlos Fuentes; and The Crying, in which he recounts a sort of epiphany or bout of insomnia.

Naturally those are not the only novels he has written. I am told that Aira writes two books a year, at least, some of which are published by a little Argentinean company named Beatriz Viterbo, after the character in Borges's story "The Aleph." The books of his that I have been able to find were published by Mondadori and Tusquets Argentina. It's frustrating, because once you've started reading Aira, you don't want to stop. His novels seem to put the theories of Gombrowicz into practice, except, and the difference is fundamental, that Gombrowicz was the abbot of a luxurious imaginary monastery, while Aira is a nun or novice among the Discalced Carmelites of the Word. Sometimes he is reminiscent of Roussel (Roussel on his knees in a bath red with blood), but the only living writer to whom he can be compared is Barcelona's Enrique Vila-Matas.

Aira is an eccentric, but he is also one of the three or four best writers working in Spanish today.